Button Portraits: 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 howwearability, 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.