LGBTQ Futures and Participatory Design: Investigating visibility, community, and the future of future workshops

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This paper presents the findings from a series of participatory design workshops with LGBTQ people living in the rural Midwestern United States. Using future workshops as a method, we seek to understand contemporary problems facing rural LGBTQ people and leverage design exercises to facilitate community members to come up with creative solutions. What we find are people grappling with the complexities of visibility, safety, and resource access in their rural communities; people who wanted to be able to use and create sociotechnical solutions that could help them navigate these complexities. Drawing on these findings, we argue for further exploration of design that experiments with the tension between visibility and safety for LGBTQ people. Further, we argue that future workshops and participatory design are well-positioned for continued work with marginalized communities, but that we need to maintain political orientations towards liberation and justice.