Abstract
Queerness in design often operates from the margins, yet to remain transformative it must also confront the heteronormative hegemonies embedded in central societal infrastructures. This paper examines how queer design intervenes in the fields of artificial intelligence, sport, and healthcare, identifying three strategies through which design can challenge normative systems: disruption, subversion, and circumvention. Through a comparative analysis of three case studies – Christensen and Conradi’s AI/IA experiments with queer artificial intelligence, Gabriel Fontana’s sport design projects Multiform and Sidelined, and the queer-led digital health platform Every Health – the paper explores how design practices reconfigure infrastructures that regulate bodies, identities, and participation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity, the paper argues that queer design operates not only as critique but as an infrastructural practice of worldmaking that materialises alternative relations of care, participation, and collective becoming.
Keywords
queer design, sexual health, queer world making, critical creative agency
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.323
Citation
Kosok, F. (2026) Bodies in play: queering AI, sport, and medicine through design, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.323
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Bodies in play: queering AI, sport, and medicine through design
Queerness in design often operates from the margins, yet to remain transformative it must also confront the heteronormative hegemonies embedded in central societal infrastructures. This paper examines how queer design intervenes in the fields of artificial intelligence, sport, and healthcare, identifying three strategies through which design can challenge normative systems: disruption, subversion, and circumvention. Through a comparative analysis of three case studies – Christensen and Conradi’s AI/IA experiments with queer artificial intelligence, Gabriel Fontana’s sport design projects Multiform and Sidelined, and the queer-led digital health platform Every Health – the paper explores how design practices reconfigure infrastructures that regulate bodies, identities, and participation. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity, the paper argues that queer design operates not only as critique but as an infrastructural practice of worldmaking that materialises alternative relations of care, participation, and collective becoming.