About
Social platforms increasingly mediate our social interactions, and the work within HCI that explores how they shape experience is overwhelmingly heteronormative. My research aims to contribute a queer perspective that shows how social platforms play a role in the lives and experiences of queer young men and to aid designers in creating technology that is more supportive of them.
The first stage of my research used interviews and a custom-designed cultural probe kit to explore the experiences of queer young men on social platforms.
Findings from this first stage were used to run co-design workshops in San Francisco to develop new concepts for how social platforms could be designed. I'm currently working to create interactive prototypes of these concepts to evaluate with users.
Publications to date
- Tommaso Armstrong, Tuck Wah Leong, Simon Buckingham Shum, and Elise van den Hoven. 2024. “This is the kind of experience I want to have”: Supporting the experiences of queer young men on social platforms through design. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), July 01–05, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661564 [PDF]
- Tommaso Armstrong. 2022. Swipe Right To Create Queer Safe Spaces Online. The Star Observer. https://www.starobserver.com.au/news/swipe-right-to-create-queer-safe-spaces-online/214606.
- Armstrong, Tommaso, and Tuck Wah Leong. 2019. SNS and the Lived Experiences of Queer Youth. In Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 376–80. Fremantle WA Australia: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3369457.3369497. [PDF]