Tangible Interfaces Lab Design Challenges

By Steve Turbek, Maria Myers, and Chad Ruble

"Physical product design is increasingly shaped by designers who only know how to work with screens. Tangible interface design — creating objects that sense, respond, and communicate through physical interaction — remains underrepresented in design curricula, while demand for it grows across automotive, medical, consumer electronics, and accessibility applications.

The Tangible Interfaces Lab is developing an open-source curriculum to close that gap. Through ""learning by making,"" the curriculum guides college design students and self-directed practitioners through the concepts, constraints, and possibilities of physical interaction design — from input methods and sensors to feedback and form.

Pratt Industrial Design graduate students Maria Myers and Chad Ruble will demonstrate their ""design challenges"": original design briefs that prompt students to build working hardware/software products as design solutions. Visitors can engage directly with the briefs and the physical prototypes they produced.

Later this year, Tangible-Interfaces.com will publish the full curriculum alongside a sourcebook of tested hardware and software — lowering the steep technical barrier that currently limits tangible interface design to specialists.

Aligned with SDG 9, this project treats design education as infrastructure: broadening who can participate in physical product innovation matters not just pedagogically, but ethically — as the tools that shape human experience increasingly require fluency in both digital and physical interaction."