Button Portraits & Queer Archival Un/Making (DIS’25, CHI’24, ICIDS’22)
“Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts ” is a tangible interactive experience that represents queer history using artifacts from the Gender and Sexuality Collection at Georgia State University. The experience tells the stories of queer activists, Lorraine Fontana and Maria Helena Dolan, who influenced and produced Atlanta’s patchwork of LGBTQ+ organizations from the mid 1970s to the present, using replicas of the activists’ own buttons as vehicles through which to experience their stories.
Publications
- Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Matthew Mosher, Anne Sullivan, Noura Howell. 2025. Queer Archival Un/Making as Tangible Information Activism. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’25).
- Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Sylvia Janicki, Noura Howell, Anne Sullivan. 2024. Designing an Archive of Feelings: Queering Tangible Interaction with Button Portraits. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24).
- Alexandra Teixeira Riggs, Noura Howell, Anne Sullivan. 2022. Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts. International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS).
Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts
Button Portraits is a tangible narrative (TN) that represents queer history using artifacts from the Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University. The experience tells the stories of queer activists who influenced and produced Atlanta’s patchwork of LGBTQ + organizations from the mid 1970s to the present. As a case study, this project offers insights on how wearability, embodiment, and queer archival methods can shape the design and experience of tangible historical narratives and their ability to call for reflection on our relationships to archival materials and history. This paper argues that queer methods can develop and reveal embodied, liminal stories in TNs in the following ways: 1. Using queer methods and queer archival scholarship to understand and design tangible narratives engenders experiences that resist binary narrative categories. 2. Designing queer history tangible narratives requires understanding the sociocultural context and the ways the experience itself can be queered. 3. Embodiment through wearability in a queer TN experience troubles the relation of bodies, spaces, selves, and stories—reinforcing our queer theoretical framing. Overall, this design case study illustrates how tangible storytelling design can be deepened through attention to queer methods, especially when used alongside embodiment and wearability.
Designing an Archive of Feelings: Queering Tangible Interaction with Button Portraits
This project explores, 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.
Queer Archival Un/Making as Tangible Information Activism
We introduce queer archival un/making, i.e. both making and unmaking with historical materials, which invites reflection on queer identities and community archives, toward information activist engagements (or, how LGBTQIA+ people strategically use communication technologies to access knowledge and further social movements). We hosted workshops where participants created buttons by drawing and collaging with materials from the Queer Zine Archive Project, then embedded buttons with their own personal oral histories. From our workshops, we provide the following design reflections on queer archival un/making: (1) un/making from queer perspectives encourages questioning, trying on, and exploring identities both personally and collectively; (2) queer archival un/making can encompass sharing artifacts outside of research institutions to engage community archives and information activist practices; (3) queer archival un/making invites reflections on what is missing from community archives and how un/making with historical materials can configure alternatives. Our design reflections expand the practices of unmaking in HCI by looking to queer archives, paralleling the messiness through which queer identities and histories are made and interpreted.