Queer Archival Design in Tangible Embodied Interactive Experiences

How might tangible design support embodied explorations of queer history, drawing from queer archives scholarship and Queer HCI? My work explores how queering design with attention to historicism, enacted through embodied interactions, can prompt affective and relational understandings of queer history. As preliminary research, this paper outlines a previous design case study, “Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts.” The project uses queer methods and archival materials to design affective, embodied engagements that queer our understandings of historical linearity, imagine alternative and coalitional relationalities, and prompt emotional connections to shared queer history. This case study serves as a starting point for developing design methodology that explores embodied, tangible, interactive experiences of queer archives. Progressing my research, I outline these considerations in the context of a proposed project entitled "Queer Embodied Mapping," which draws on historicism to queer tangible interaction design by fabulating a collective archive of embodied oral histories.


INTRODUCTION
My research focuses on developing queer design methodology for embodied, tangible interaction design of archival materials.This work expands and deepens our understanding of Queer HCI, imagining tangible interactive experiences that engender queer relationalities in explorations of queer history.Why queer archives, and why now?With recent efforts to diminish or ban queer existence from the classroom, healthcare, and public society [3,13,37], access to queer stories (and reflections of queer identity in history) is more critical now than ever.Studying queer archives also helps us consider pre-digital information networking practices that furthered social movements and provided access to queer knowledge [49].As McKinney notes, lesbian feminism is at the heart of building, altering, and sustaining information networks, which formed early precursors to digital technologies today.In studying queer archives, we therefore consider "the complex transitions between media, listening for the unexpected echoes of the digital in the past" [49].By using queer historicism in design, my work brings these echoes into our understanding of contemporary digital technologies, imagining how queer archives can reflect on Queer HCI and design today.Uncovering new understandings of the past that "reconfigure the present" [56], I draw from scholars who have proposed techniques of fabulation for design futuring [63,68], collective media archaeologies [60], or speculative historical engagements [19].Using queer historicism in tangible, embodied design specifically, I respond to growing scholarship in Queer HCI that seeks to design tangible experiences outside of "online contexts" that support queer expression [8], as well as participatory approaches that design with and for trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming individuals [27,29,66].I also look to ways that Black queer scholars "translate their lived, embodied experiences" into collective knowledge and archives [61], understanding how bodies are shaped by objects and their histories [1].Considering embodied, collective histories, I also look to how queer archives scholars center feelings, affect, and ephemeral materials in historical work [18,44], envision queer or alternative temporalities [20], and recognize queer history as coalitional and relational, forging uncommon couplings and communities [30,49].Drawing from these approaches, my work looks to queer historicism for dimensions-among these, temporal, affective, embodied, and relational-within which we can design and reimagine embodied queer technologies.I ask how attention to these archival lenses can help us queer the design of tangible embodied experiences that explore queer history, entangling the emotional and relational experiences that surround technological interaction and historical artifacts.
relationalities and experiences that prompt resistance to normative historical interpretations and technological ideologies?" My overarching research objective is to develop a set of design recommendations and approaches for queering the design of tangible embodied interactive experiences that explore and contribute to queer history.Doing so, I consider both queer personal identity (or design for queer identities) and queering design, as in, to borrow Light's definition, "to treat it obliquely, to cross it, to go in an adverse or opposite direction.In other words, 'queering' is problematizing apparently structural and foundational relationships with critical intent" [45].In queering design, I ask how tangible embodied interaction can resist the "regimes of the normal, " embracing messy abundances, and reflecting intersectional, radical cooperation [44].To develop my design recommendations, I am in the process of creating a suite of tangible, embodied design case studies that use queer historicism approaches (contextualized within queer archival scholarship) to design experiences that explore queer history.I then intend to evaluate how these case studies inspire alternative, affective, relational responses to archival materials, foregrounding embodied collective knowledge that resists normative historical models and evokes complex, queer connections between bodies, feelings, and histories.

BACKGROUND
My research draws from prior work in queering Human Computer Interaction (Queer HCI), theory from queer archives scholarship, scholarship that foregrounds queer bodies, tangible design that foregrounds embodied intimacy, and tangible design for cultural heritage artifacts.In my work, I build on tactics of Queer HCI characterized by Light [45], as well as tactics of "failure" and "glitching" in queering digital technologies [21,22,30,31,54,58].I also recognize design for queer identities in online communities [5,28,39], participatory approaches in designing by and for trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming individuals [27,29,66], and critiques of exclusionary technologies by queer and trans scholars [41,43].In queering design, I build on work that subverts or glitches existing systems through tangible embodied interaction [6,7,12,32], explores wearables for queer expression [8], and uses tangible interaction to explore intimate opacities [36] and queer relationalities [43].
For my theoretical foundation, I draw from queer archives scholarship, including work on queer temporalities [20], queer and trans affect in archives [10,14,15,18,44,46,47], and queer relationalities in archival information structures [16,49].In queer archives specifically, I also navigate the tension between recognizing and making queer archives visible, against their inherent liminality and resistance to heteronormative archival institutional models [48].I also recognize feminist "entanglement" and queer approaches to the body in HCI [33,65], along with queer approaches to bodies and archives [1,18,44,61].Attending to bodies and histories, I look to physical experiences that center marginalized histories [11] or propose critical fabulations that call for us to "re-presence" invisible labor at the heart of technological innovation [60].This scholarship reflects HCI's growing design engagements with historicism [62] and other critical works that foreground past silences and exclusions in technological design [38,42,57,64,70].In designing for queer experiences of history, I lastly look to artists who have explored relationships between archival materials and queer communities to build new creative works [17,50].With my work in queering tangible embodied explorations of queer history, I aim to broaden Queer HCI by creating experiences and design recommendations that entangle bodies, archival materials, and stories to evoke intimate, affective reflections on queer history.

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
To develop and deepen queer design methods for tangible design, I first situate my work within research through design [24], and reflective design [59], generating new design knowledge by reflexively approaching the archive and foregrounding embodied experiences.Doing so, I also engage historicism as a design method [62], as well as critical fabulations [56], drawing concurrently from work that methodologically foregrounds bodies in interaction design [23,34,35,65].In developing queering as a method for tangible embodied design, I not only look to tactics from Queer HCI [45] and Keeling's "Queer OS" [40], but also to Brim and Ghaziani's Imagining Queer Methods for ways to use the tenets of queer theory to "tweak or explode what is possible with our existing procedures" [26].Building from these methodological approaches, I aim to develop design recommendations, drawn from my design case studies, that attend to sociocultural and political entanglements of bodies and histories, focusing on queer bodies and their relationships to the archive, while reflexively acknowledging my own situatedness in the design process.
Analyzing my queer tangible design case studies, I plan to interview individuals as they engage and design with the experiences.As participants will be both experiencing and designing, I first situate my analysis within participatory frameworks that center queer individuals [27].I then plan to analyze audio transcripts and video footage using abductive analysis to develop codes, themes, and ultimately design recommendations [67].I use abductive analysis while recognizing my own positionality, after Braun and Clarke [9], to both acknowledge existing queer theories while cultivating new theories and methods of queering embodied, tangible design.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS: DESIGN CASE STUDY
A current project that will serve as one of the design case studies for my dissertation is entitled "Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts" [55].The project is a tangible, wearable experience that explores Atlanta's queer history using artifacts from the Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University [25] (Fig. 1)."Button Portraits" uses archival buttons from the collection to reveal oral histories of two Southern queer activists, linking the activists' own objects to specific audio fragments.When a participant "wears" a button, pinning it to an audio player worn at chest-height, it plays a unique fragment of oral history, engendering a sensation of embodied intimacy in relation to the anecdote and artifact.
The project explores how this intimacy, engendered through wearable tangible interaction, allows participants to draw personal, affective connections to historical artifacts.These affective connections, thus queer or intentionally entangle or unsettle our relationships Figure 1: A participant experiences "Button Portraits" by placing an archival button on a wearable audio device that plays a corresponding fragment of oral history.This gesture prompts reflection, feelings of embodied intimacy, and evokes complex, queer relationships between the wearer and the activist recounting their story.
to history and the archive through embodied experience.Drawing attention to these connections, "Button Portraits" offers insights on how wearable, tangible interaction and queer archival scholarship can shape the design of embodied historical experiences and their ability to call for reflection on our relationships to archival materials and history.

PROPOSED NEXT STEPS
Next steps for my research will be to conduct participatory workshops with "Button Portraits," where queer individuals can make their own buttons and record oral histories that correspond to their artifacts.I also plan to develop a second design case study entitled "Queer Embodied Mapping," which builds on body mapping [2,8,69], as well as wearable design for bodily self-reflection [4,[51][52][53], by drawing onto the body while recording oral histories that correspond to sensations of embodied gender identity.Collaborators in the project are invited to autoethnographically share articles of clothing (or worn ephemera), onto which they draw or inscribe felt experiences of gender non-conformity and queer / trans identity.While drawing, individuals record these sensations as embodied oral histories, locating how their tactile drawings speak to queer affect, temporalities, and collective engagements.After recording, they can touch sensors on their clothing that will play back their recordings, locating their oral history in embodied tactile sensations.Subsequent individuals can similarly draw and record embodied anecdotes that contribute to collective garments that queer design for archival experiences by enacting queer, affective, relationalities in ongoing oral histories."Queer Embodied Mapping" engages and deepens body mapping by embracing queer and trans ways of knowing in design, further resisting normative somatic design through reflexive, situated engagements of embodied oral histories.These next steps for "Button Portraits" and "Queer Embodied Mapping" advance my research question of "How do we queer tangible embodied interactive design to explore queer history?" by embracing collectivity and queer relationalities in design and making.Together, these projects engender the creation of affective oral histories while centering embodied, ephemeral materials of queer archives.I plan to evaluate these design case studies by running participatory sessions in which individuals can design buttons or draw on their bodies while recording corresponding oral histories that contribute to an ongoing, collective archive.I then plan to transcribe audio and video footage from these sessions and analyze the data using abductive analysis to develop codes, themes, and design recommendations for queering tangible embodied interactive design to explore queer history.My resulting queer, tangible, embodied design methodology seeks to envision alternative relationalities and ways of knowing that reimagine and resist normative technological ideologies and uniform interpretations of histories.

COMPLETION PLAN
I plan to complete my doctoral program at the end of the 2026 Spring semester, and I outline a rough timeline to meet this completion goal in Table 1.
Within my doctoral completion plan, I also outline various opportunities to publish my work before defending, which will contribute both to the writing and research portions of my dissertation, as well as to the larger body of work within Queer HCI.