As AI and data systems often falter when encountering queer identities and knowledge, reinforcing existing oppressions, queer people have resisted such systems and their normalizing tendencies. This pictorial explores tactics of queering AI through a collaborative zine-making project (i.e. zineography) that challenges generative AI and data systems. We share how we workshopped and materialized queering tactics in zine spreads; analyzed these spreads according to materials, content, and tone; and visualized our analysis as thematic collages. We contribute: (1) tangible characteristics of queering AI and data systems (i.e. materials, tones, and aesthetics); and (2) design opportunities for using zineographies as a radical method for building and collectively sharing knowledge about a marginalized community, including recommendations for enacting queer zineographies. By materializing queering tactics through zine-making, we invite embodied, action-oriented critiques that question dominant techno-solutionist movements and trace queer possibilities outside of their normalizing narratives.

Emotion AI (EAI) is increasingly deployed and ethically controversial—motivating a need for greater public understanding, critique, and ethical discussions. Facial Emotion AI (FEAI) is a common type of EAI that infers emotions from facial expressions. We developed Explore-FEAI, an FEAI model and accompanying interactive website that offers open-ended exploration with FEAI firsthand. We designed a workshop wherein participants learn about FEAI using Explore-FEAI and discuss societal implications, partnering with local organizations to host community workshops (N=30). Our findings analyze participants’ growing critical AI literacy through exploring inputs/outputs, mechanistic reasoning, data critiques, sociocultural critiques, ethical concerns, and embodied and material exploration of FEAI. Our discussion offers informal embodied auditing as an approach for critical engagement with AI through embodied and material exploration, as well as reflections on informal auditing for supporting AI literacy, informal auditing for questioning EAI ethics, and expanding participation roles for more holistic EAI training.

To critically examine the role of AI in historical representation and resist anti-LGBTQIA+ biases and erasures, we leverage un/making and propose a tactic we name material reconfigurations. We share an autoethnographic account of un/making and materially reconfiguring AI-generated images of queer histories: the lead author’s memories of queer places and events. Through hand annotating, scratching, burying, submerging, and walking with physical images, they un/make and reconfigure, highlighting embodied aspects of archival records unparsable by generative AI. We propose that un/making and materially reconfiguring synthetic archival images can resist generative AI’s increasingly hegemonic role in misrepresenting historical data and erasing queer identities. We contribute reflections on un/making and material reconfigurations as tangible tactics for queering AI, attuning to queer temporalities to unsettle AI-generated histories, using embodied, autoethnographic practices as critical strategies, and working through tensions of use and refusal in Queer AI research.

Interactive technology design is situated within environmental and sociocultural context. This pictorial develops an In-Situ Seeding method for engaging with site-specific sensory experiences. This method stems from a previous TEI Studio, where we utilized Sensory Portfolios, digital sensors, and other materials to make sense of interaction in place. We present an annotated collection of our Studio experiences and autobiographical retrospective reflections. These Seeds supported in-situ sensory explorations and examination of entanglements between documentation, data, location, history, and human and more-than-human agents. We contribute to literature around (1) walk-and-talk sensory explorations, (2) situated entanglements with technological artifacts, and (3) relationships between human and non-human agents in shared locations and over varied timescales. Our reflections point towards continued development for In-Situ Seeding as a method and suggest its further use and guidance to support future sensory explorers.

Drawing on queer and disability theories alongside tangible body mapping techniques, we explore alternative ways of mapping embodied experiences and expressing affective sensations. Our collaborative autoethnographic approach incorporates sensors to trace our somatic experiences over time, pairing visualizations of contextual biodata with personal reflections in written or spoken form. We unpack how these alternative approaches to body mapping support reflecting on, communicating, and deepening understanding of embodied experiences by foregrounding temporal and situated aspects. We offer expanded body mapping methods by sharing a plurality of experiences that embrace queer and crip ways of knowing, foregrounding alternate temporal and spatial representations.

The design of interactive systems and digital artefacts often makes use of digital or analog sensory data as a way to “capture” human senses and sensory experiences. Yet, designing for and with sensory data is complex because of our unique, embodied ways of making sense of our somatosensory experiences. Sensory data does not have one prescribed meaning for everyone. We propose a one-day Studio at TEI to start a dialogue about work with sensory data and its representation of human sensory experience. Specifically, we propose a guided walk and series of sensory explorations in Bordeaux to contemplate the interplay between first-person somatosensory experiences and streams of site-specific data from various sensors. By walking and noticing together, this Studio invites participants to engage in a process of creative reflection on their felt experiences, their connection to their surroundings, and their stance within or outside the design community.

In "Mold Sounds," we design a more-than-human encounter that explores how biomaterials, specifically molds, can reorient narratives of toxicity towards polyphonic, multi-species assemblages that speak to queer ecologies. We designed an environment in which molds grow and interact with conductive components, thus altering the sounds produced by the artifact. We reflect on how this helps complicate essentialist, heteronormative narratives in human and non-human relations. Through material engagements, "Mold Sounds" fosters reflections on how we might design for polyphony, or multi-species temporal rhythms, reconsider the nature of toxicity, and explore the unpredictability of queer ecological entanglements in more-than-human design.

``Red [Redacted] Theatre” is a tangible puzzle-based experience exploring queer history. We used queer methods to design puzzles with archival materials, guiding participants from a more normative “surface” understanding of history into exploring queer histories, breaking familiar language and constructs through play and tangible interaction. Our reflections contribute design considerations for queering tangible interaction through puzzles: (1) designing and deconstructing layers of queer understanding, (2) attending to situatedness in designing tangible puzzle artifacts, and (3) designing puzzles that solve to complexity. We also offer insights on how facilitation and debrief of the experience can prompt reflection on queer history and ways of understanding. Overall, this pictorial contributes to Queer HCI by deepening queer tangible interaction, particularly for exploring queer history.

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) designing for personal, archival experiences; and (4) designing within difference. Through this work, we foreground queer stories to affect emotional reflections on marginalized histories, entangling the complex connections between bodies, feelings, histories, and shared queer experiences.

Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The triptych installation incorporates different forms of biodata and three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. In this paper, we put forth three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness. In doing so, we contribute to how TEI might facilitate postcolonial understandings and sensibilities.

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.