Conference Agenda

Hidden Constellations examines how queer sapphic spatiality in New York City is shaped through everyday negotiations rather than formal venues. While official data record only four lesbian bars, this paper argues that scarcity in data does not signify absence in lived experience. Drawing from qualitative interviews and participatory cognitive mapping, the study treats mapping as a queer design method that transforms memory, emotion, and silence into spatial knowledge. Informed by queer phenomenology, feminist and critical cartography, and data feminism, the research reframes mapping from representation to resonance. The paper shows how sapphic individuals tactically inhabit, sense, and remake urban space through affective and relational practices. By translating unrecorded experiences into spatial knowledge, this study introduces layered overlay mapping and relational comparative analysis to foreground embodiment, reflexivity, and the politics of belonging.

This article explores the methodological approaches developed within the Tropicuir research project, an investigation of activist queer art and design practices in Brazil, started in the 2010s. Through a combination of activist research, sentimental cartography, and collaborative curatorial practice, the study examines how aesthetic-political actions function as strategies of micropolitical resistance, collective memory, and worldmaking. Drawing from fieldwork in exhibitions curation, archival practices, art auctions and activist networks, the research articulates a methodological framework that blurs the boundaries between design and art, embracing embodied, affective, and relational modes of inquiry. By engaging concepts such as anthropophagy, micropolitics, and localized knowledge, Tropicuir proposes a queer epistemology that feeds from South perspectives and challenges normative academic paradigms. The project demonstrates how design research, when queered, can contribute to social transformation by creating experimental archives and networks that reimagine ethics, politics, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality dissidents in contemporary Brazil.

Trans and queer individuals, particularly transmasculine, transfeminine, nonbinary and genderqueer folks, remain underrepresented in contemporary design practice despite a growing awareness of the community’s existence. This project creates a set of translational materials co-created by members of the queer community. These materials are intended to educate industry professionals on queer perspectives and provide actionable methods to help design solutions that meet the needs of queer people. Co-creation processes centering the queer community were used to identify and describe key queer-inclusive design principles: discretion, perception, inclusion, and motion. These principles were then translated into an educational zine intended for creative professionals, as well as a product that embodies queer-inclusive design: Tac-tiles, an inclusive fidget system. Together, these materials provide a framework to jumpstart the design of queer-positive products, spaces, and experiences that will improve the lives of queer users and many other marginalized populations.

This paper examines how design research can unmake AI's classificatory ontologies through situated and embodied annotation practices. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical data epistemologies, it reframes bias not as a technical flaw but as a generative condition that reveals how knowledge is produced and negotiated within human–AI assemblages. An autotheoretical experiment grounds the inquiry. The researcher creates and annotates a dataset of self-representations using subjective, affective, and relational labels, training a small-scale model to probe classification as an interpretive encounter shaped by embodiment, ambiguity, and positionality. Building on the shift from debiasing toward reflexive data practices in design and HCI, the paper proposes situated annotation as a design inquiry for unsettling inherited AI ontologies and repositioning machine vision as an accountable, partial, and embodied way of knowing.

This article examines hacking, understood as the alteration of an object’s function, as a queer and feminist design practice that disrupts normative relations between bodies and things. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of the feminist snap as a moment of rupture and reconfiguration, we define hacking as an embodied act of refusal that reconfigures everyday things. Through "Función Rota", an audiovisual research project that gathers product hacking scenes in movies, we identify hacking as a form of both critique and speculation: it reveals the normative logics embedded in things, while opening up the possibility of re-prototyping from below. Through feminist and queer frameworks, hacking emerges as a meta-design methodology that decentralises authorship, transforms apparently closed things into participatory ones, and reimagines artefacts as open-ended prototypes. The article proposes a perspective on hacking as a generative practice of queer world-making, cultivating plural material futures that extend beyond standardised design paradigms.

Textiles play an important role in queer storytelling, encoding a rich history of communication in societies where such identities have been suppressed or criminalised. This research explores the queering of mapping and model making in built-environment design research through the case study of the author’s textile mapmaking practice. Building on queer political theorist Cathy Cohen’s writings on the provocational and ‘othered’ nature of queerness within societal structures, this research explores how the production process of these ‘mapestries’ challenges the norms of architectural modeling and representation, requiring both fabricator and audience to engage with the material. Through this queering of spatial analysis, this practice builds a methodological framework that allows for novel research perspectives. The resulting interactive textiles serve as haptic artifacts that increase accessibility of analysis and representation, acting as tools for community engagement and hands-on learning.