A Tangible Talk with Deren Güler of Teknikio

Interview conducted August 31, 2026

For my forthcoming book, Designing the Tangible Interface, Deren Güler of teknikio was kind enough to speak with me!

Deren Güler is the founder and CEO of Teknikio, an educational electronics company building NSF-funded STEM toolsets and coding platforms. A scientist, researcher, and designer by training, Güler has spent over a decade at the intersection of hardware development, curriculum design, and participatory research. She is a Part-Time Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design, a Lecturer at Columbia University Teachers College, and Director of the Master’s in Creative Computing at Shifta by Elisava. Previously, Güler co-founded FatCatFabLab, a community fabrication workspace in New York City. She was named to the New York Times “30 Under 30” list and received the Brooklyn Fashion and Design Accelerator Fellow of the Year award. She is the author of Crafting Wearables: Blending Technology with Fashion and several peer-reviewed papers.

How has teaching informed your product design strategy? Do you have a favorite product in the lineup that is the most “tangible”?

Because I make an educational product, the user experience is that of both a learner and a teacher, so in a sense I have two customers. Teaching helps me see things from the teacher’s perspective and understand where the instructions or guides I’m offering might fail or be inadequate. Teachers might be looking for something that’s really easy to follow and demonstrate, while also wanting their students to grapple with and think critically about what they’re making. So the challenge is to hit both levels of critical thinking and engagement.

I think my favorite project is the Sparking Sense kit, because it’s just a bunch of basic components and alligator clips, and you can mix and match them in so many ways. Most people gravitate toward a product with a clear output, like the origami kit, but Sparking Sense is more open-ended.

Teknikio’s kits let people embed electronics into fabric, paper, and everyday objects rather than a dedicated enclosure. What did you have to unlearn from traditional product design to make “material-agnostic” electronics actually work?

I actually don’t have a background as a product designer, so I’m not sure I really unlearned anything. Traditional electronics are designed to be easy to plug and play, which is how the breadboard was invented. But the breadboard is a stiff object and not very material-agnostic. I wanted to keep the price point low, and I wanted to stress the idea of parts in a toolbox that can be reused. So I think it was really this reusability that helped me design something material-agnostic. The two kind of go hand in hand.

Tangible interfaces for kids need to survive rough handling and unpredictable use. What’s a failure from user testing that changed a core part of a kit’s design?

I think the instructions are where I’ve changed things the most, along with the order of operations, by watching what kinds of shortcuts people try to take. For example, I remember teaching a sewing workshop where the kids just wanted to tie knots rather than sew across the fabric. Then I realized that, if they really wanted to, they could use conductive fabric tape and just sew at the ends. So it’s things like this: giving options based on time and, unfortunately, attention span, which I think is decreasing in this digital-native age compared to when I was younger.

How do you calibrate the balance between open-ended, exploratory play and enough structure that a kid (or a teacher) doesn’t get stuck or give up?

I start with something quick and try to be clear about levels. It can be hard to balance the “aha” moment with the pride of “I made this, I invested time and effort, and it works.” The second one I can’t really calibrate for so much as hope for. Often it’s just about making the example end project cool enough that they’ll have the patience to get there.

You went from physics into a design master’s — what was the hardest translation between those two ways of thinking, and did anything from physics turn out to be surprisingly useful in tangible interface design?

Lots of things! I’m a hands-on person. I like to understand and see things visually, and that can be true of building a circuit or writing out math equations. I think this connection is really starting to happen for me with the Tekniverse: using all kinds of data (real-time sensor data, streaming data, historical data) and then interpreting it into something. For a scientist, that might be a proof, a graph, or a model that explains what’s happening. For a tangible interface, it’s pretty much the same, but expressed more simply (or colloquially), and maybe it doesn’t have to be a solution or a proof. It’s just offering a representation that could spark an idea or a solution. I don’t think the goals are that different; it’s just a decision about where you want it to go in the world.

Watching architecture/design grad students struggle with Arduino is what sparked Teknikio. What specifically did their confusion look like — was it the code, the wiring, the abstraction of “circuit,” or something else?

It was the translation from code to wiring, like plugging something into pin 9 on an Arduino while the example code says pin 2, and not understanding the issue. That’s when I realized they weren’t really following what was happening, and I thought it might be better if they had an analog experience first. For example, if they know the light should turn on and what that looks like, maybe they’ll be more curious to troubleshoot, because they know it works and that it must be either a wiring or a code issue. I saw this a lot with STEM kits as well. It’s hard to troubleshoot and stay engaged when you don’t know whether the stuff actually works, and it’s easy to assume something is broken or that you just “can’t” do it.

You built Teknikio around being gender-neutral rather than “for girls” — steering away from pink-and-sparkles STEM marketing. What design decisions (form, color, packaging, instructions) actually moved that needle, versus ones that didn’t?

I think picking gender-neutral colors is necessary just because there’s so much pink- and blue-washing out there. At least when it’s a different color, people don’t automatically categorize it in their minds or on a store shelf. Honestly, I don’t think the activities matter as much, since they’re fairly open-ended, just making little animals or toys. But unfortunately, a lot of parents hesitate when it comes to buying something like a sewing kit for a little boy. I think this has gotten better over the years, and I’ve learned, again, that it’s often a double layer of designing for the parents and for the kids. I try to design for the kids and hope they can convince their parents :)