The Cutting E.D.G.E.

Queer history in San Francisco is being erased: sites get demolished and stories are dutifully maintained in archives, but we don’t see them in our everyday lives. My MS thesis takes this problem on. We have few museums displaying our history, which also means we aren’t bound to any form. I set out to understand how queer people relate to and experience history, searching for insights that could inform a system that reflects our culture and community. After 15 formal interviews and dozens of informal conversations with peers and advisors, I walked away with four key insights:

1. Insight 01

   Formal mentorship feels awkward.

   →
   Design response

   Create fictional characters as low-pressure intergenerational intermediaries rather than formal mentors.

2. Insight 02

   People want to participate in history, not stare at it in a museum.

   →
   Design response

   Holders become part of the system by carrying, visiting with, and passing the object to someone else.

3. Insight 03

   Queer history is shared on the streets, where it happened.

   →
   Design response

   Each Edger is tied to a real physical site and asks the holder to return to place.

4. Insight 04

   Being an outsider allows queer people to push things to the edge.

   →
   Design response

   Avoid institutional visual language; build a strange, if not slightly eccentric, handmade system with its own characters, symbols, and rules.

How do you reactivate forgotten history so it feels personal? What is the right material for this, something that travels across time? How does it feel unique, not institutional? How do you bridge a generational divide with a huge chasm (the AIDS crisis) in your way? My thesis attempts to carve out a possible solution to these far-reaching questions.

I was heavily influenced by ACT UP in my pursuit for a name of this project. I went with the Cutting E.D.G.E.: Enliven Discourse through Grounded Experience. I wanted to push the bounds of traditional wood turning and create a new symbology for queer culture, while leveraging artificial intelligence as a way to tell our stories.

I hand-turned each Edger on a lathe and embedded an NFC chip into the base. I built 25 distinct AI characters using Anthropic’s API, each with its own voice and knowledge of a specific site in San Francisco queer history. The historical-fiction layer is grounded in archival records rather than free-form invention, and the interaction rules are designed to move people out of the chat and back into the city.

Built with Anthropic’s API · OpenClaw agent framework · NFC · wood lathe

The service blueprint below maps every Edger’s loop: what the holder does, what the characters and system do in response, and the rules and infrastructure underneath.

I launched the first 15 Edgers at The Stud and used real circulation behavior to change the rules for the next ten. The point of the pilot was not only whether people enjoyed the conversation, but whether a digital interaction could change physical behavior. Seventy percent of holders reached their assigned historic site.

25 Edgers have launched and are in active circulation in five US states. I’m exploring curriculum use with an oral history professor who teaches at SFSU and CCSF. I have so many dreams and ideas of how this work can grow. If you do too, reach out and let’s scheme together.