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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.