Designing an Archive of Feelings: Queering Tangible Interaction with Button Portraits

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642312 CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2024 How can tangible, wearable design encourage affective, embodied reflections on queer history? We expand Queer HCI scholarship, using queer theory to inform the design of wearable experiences that explore archives of gender and sexuality. Our project, “Button Portraits,” invites individuals to listen to oral histories from prominent queer activists by pinning archival buttons to a wearable audio player, eliciting moving personal impressions. We observed 17 participants’ experiences with “Button Portraits,” and with semi-structured interviews, surfaced reflections on how our design evoked personal connections to history, queer self-identification, and relatability to archival materials. We offer the following design directions: (1) designing tangible archives of feeling; (2) queering tangible, wearable interactions in design; (3) desig

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642312 CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2024 How can tangible, wearable design encourage affective, embodied reflections on queer history? We expand Queer HCI scholarship, using queer theory to inform the design of wearable experiences that explore archives of gender and sexuality. Our project, “Button Portraits,” invites individuals to listen to oral histories from prominent queer activists by pinning archival buttons to a wearable audio player, eliciting moving personal impressions.