"We happen to be different and different is not bad": Designing for Intersectional Fat-Positive Information-Seeking

Fat liberation is a social movement advocating for equal treatment of fat people, who are currently subjected to harmful stereotypes, harassment, discrimination at school and work, and medical mistreatment, and is an understudied movement in HCI research. Due to the social and legal acceptability of anti-fatness, many physical spaces, such as businesses and healthcare providers, are unsafe or inaccessible for fat people. We conducted three in-person and virtual participatory design workshops with fat liberationist organizers and community members (N = 15) to imagine fat positive technologies. Participants designed a system to help them find size-inclusive resources, services, and healthcare providers in the offline world with design features centered around intersectionality, and participants’ desire for technologies that recognized their diverse identities and characteristics. We present features and values for a fat-positive information-seeking system and synthesize present and historical HCI theories into a design framework for intersectional fat-positive HCI.