Computation increasingly takes place not on an individual device, but distributed throughout a material or environment, whether it be a silicon surface, a network of wireless devices, a collection of biological cells or a programmable material. Emerging programming models embrace this reality and provide abstractions inspired by physics, such as computational fields, that allow such systems to be programmed holistically, rather than in terms of individual devices. This paper aims to provide a unified approach for the investigation and engineering of computations programmed with the aid of space{\textendash}time abstractions, by bringing together a number of recent results, as well as to identify critical open problems.