Tommaso Armstrong has just gained 3 new letters after his name, with a human-centred design thesis on how queer people experience social and dating platforms designed largely by and for straight people…
Tomm A
rmstrong has a long history with CIC, starting out as an intern while studying UTS’s groundbreaking double-degree in the Transdisciplinary School — the Bachelor of Creative Intelligence & Innovation. He developed a learning analytics dashboard for our blogging platform for the Master of Data Science & Innovation students, when CIC was running this 2015-18. And then he returned for a PhD…
Tomm’s PhD was based in the Interaction Design Discipline in the UTS Faculty of Engineering & IT, lead supervisor Elise van den Hoven. CIC’s Simon Buckingham Shum was delighted to be invited to join the team midway.
So what was his PhD about? It is now well established that LGBTQ+ (“queer”) young people depend heavily on mainstream social media and dating platforms to find peer support and explore their identities. However, we have a poor understanding of their experiences of such platforms, which are designed largely by and for straight people. Tomm’s research decided to focus on the experiences of queer young men, in order to empower them to envision future designs that recognise the complexity of their identities, their networks, and personal safety. His website not only displays his visual design skills, but conveys his PhD in an engaging way, including a site tuned for UX designers.
A paper from his research in the premier Designing Interactive Systems conference conveys the quality of the work:
Armstrong, T., Leong, T. W., Buckingham Shum, S., & Van Den Hoven, E. (2024). “This is the kind of experience I want to have”: Supporting the experiences of queer young men on social platforms through design. Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Copenhagen DK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 1681-1700. https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661564
His full thesis is in the UTS OPUS archive (see below), and here we are celebrating with him on Alumni Green 🙂
Tomm is now based in San Francisco — connect with him to at https://tomma.so
Designing to improve social platform experiences for and with queer young men
Tommaso Armstrong (2025), Doctoral Dissertation, University of Technology Sydney, AUS: http://hdl.handle.net/10453/193512
Abstract: Queer young men depend heavily on social platforms. However, their needs are often not adequately considered in the design of general platforms and they can be exposed to intra-community harms on platforms such as dating apps. Recent work within HCI has exposed some of these issues, although there are limitations with existing work understanding current experiences and there is a lack of work that involves design approaches. To address these gaps and extend current understandings, this research took a multi-study approach. First, an exploratory study used semi-structured interviews with 9 participants to ground the work. Second, an in-depth study with 24 participants used semi-structured interviews and probes to better understand experiences. Finally, a co-design study was used to translate findings into design concepts. This started by running co-design workshops with 13 technology designers before the resulting concepts were evaluated in sessions with 15 queer young men. The findings from this work extend current understandings of how queer young men use social platforms by: confirming the importance of social platforms for queer young men, showing that curation practices extend beyond concealment of identity, calling attention to intra-community harms as a significant issue, highlighting the role that dating apps played in finding community and peers, and bringing light to ways that social platforms are used in not safe for work ways not currently described in HCI literature. This work also provides a number of design recommendations in the following areas: giving people have more agency over their experiences, helping people navigate mismatched expectations on dating apps, and helping people connect to community. This thesis makes four main contributions. Empirical contributions relate to extending understandings of, the experiences of queer young men on social platforms, and how to design social platforms to be supportive of their experiences. Two further artefact contributions are made, a probe kit that can be used in future work, and a design resource for social platform designers that makes our design recommendation accessible outside of academia. The thesis ends by proposing a number of directions for future work to design platforms in ways that are: more dynamic, reduce the negative impacts of idealised presentations and support trust on dating apps; and to conduct further research into the ways that social platforms are used: to curate presentation beyond concealment, in ways that include dating apps and NSFW uses; and to explore the transferability of our findings to other groups.