I’ve been interested in and thinking about what I call “physical interaction design” for a while now. Physical interaction design being one of the points where interaction design and industrial design intersect.

Seems that others are thinking about it too…

Ira Laefsky, a researcher associated with Dave Farber’s Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, contacted me today.

He’s involved with the development of a physical workstation for remote telecollaboration while engaged in document-based work and is looking for resources concerning “the design and development of physical systems that have interactive controls and displays, as well as industrial design aspects and embedded software.”

I wasn’t much help to Ira, as he was already aware of Baumann and Thomas’ “User Interface Design for Electronic Appliances,” Bergman’s “Information Appliances and Beyond” and Jenny Preece’s recent “Interaction Design.”

Ira correctly pointed out that all of these seem more oriented to screen design than the development of physical systems.

So, brad lauster (dot com) readers, do any of you have any pointers for us? Please leave a comment if you do!