The Cutting E.D.G.E.

A portion of my MS Design Thesis project. 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. Given that we have limited museums displaying our history, we’re not 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:

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 25 wooden figurines (I call them Edgers) on a lathe and embedded an NFC chip into each base. I then built 25 distinct AI agents on Anthropic’s API. Each has its own personality, voice, and knowledge of a specific site in San Francisco’s queer history. I wrote original historical fiction narratives for each character, all of which is rooted in archival records. Unboxing history. I designed the full user experience, including a pass-off system so the Edgers circulate between people.

25 Edgers have launched and are in active circulation in five US states. I am working with an oral history professor at UCSF and CCSF to integrate Edgers into their upcoming fall curriculum. I have so many dreams and ideas of how this work can grow. If you do too, reach out and let’s scheme together.