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Mechanical Library is a open education project to inspire students to understand how the physical world is designed and made.

It includes:

• A “wall of mechanisms” museum exhibit of the 36-72 most interesting and common mechanisms, such as the Universal Joint, that make our world work.
• Mechanical-Library.org is the companion website. Each mechanism has a QR code that brings up the page to explain how it works, with videos, 3D printable models and augmented reality models.

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.

"The Mechanical Library is an open-source museum exhibit and curriculum that introduces middle and high school students to mechanical engineering. It was made in partnership with NYC First, a leading STEM education not for profit, that supports underserved NYC public school students.

Each motorized mechanism has a QR code to a web page that shows how the mechanisms are used with photos, videos, 3D, & lego models.

The cabinet stands 6 feet tall, by 32"" wide and 12"" deep, with information panels on either side measuring 24"" wide. The cabinet runs on normal 120v power, drawing under 5 amps.

Find out more at Mechanical-Library.org"