About Thea and Mind The Gap
Thea Chambers is an access and inclusive design consultant, with 20 years of lived everyday experience, and 12 years of experience as Design Director of the multi award winning architectural practice Chambers McMillan Architects. Their own award winning family home,The Ramp House, was designed collaboratively with the whole family (the kids were 8 and 11 at the time and lots of cardboard models were used in the process). The Ramp House has become a beacon of excellent inclusive design, being sited often in publications, lectures and websites about designing inclusively.
Thea has specialised in collaborative working, especially in the inclusive design sector, since having her daughter Greta, who has cerebral palsy, is a wheelchair user and an eyegaze computer user. Working as Greta’s creative co-ordinator and communication partner for 20 years, has given Thea valuable skills in listening, communicating ideas, problem solving, planning, and bigger picture strategising. In the last year, Thea has designed and instigated a ‘bespoke foundation course’ for Greta’s post school education. This involves co-ordinating and training five creative assistants who work with Greta during the week on film, art, theatre, film score, literacy and campaigning, all subjects that Greta is talented in and enjoys. This is probably a first of its kind in Scotland, and provides a beneficial exemplar of how other young disabled artists could be engaged in their post school years.
Thea’s experience and abilities in creative collaborative workshops stem from several years of running sessions with Woodcraft Folk, where children explore their understanding of spaces around them through making and creating imaginatively. She then incorporated this approach in first year architectural design at Edinburgh Uni, when she co-ran and re-wrote the first year syllabus, instigating creative workshops and a series of lectures to explore different elements of the built environment. She has recently returned to teach architectural design (after a break to support her daughter), and is enjoying the potential of being the inclusive design expert in the Department.
In Chambers McMillan Architects, as Design Director, Thea was responsible for client relations, brief writing, and co-design. Her practice strengths were: people skills, collaborative working, problem solving, thinking differently, listening and understanding each client’s story, and their needs and desires, and translating this into spatial design. She worked collaboratively on the design process with her partner at the time. A key part of the design process on specialist projects was specifically designed series of creative workshops which were accessible to children and young people with many varied support need.
As a parent member of the Family Council, Thea became co-chair on the Children and Families Consultation sub-group for the RHCYP reprovision. This involved many meetings, and co-writing a set of design principles to ensure that families, and children and young people found their place within the design, which were referenced in all the multidisciplinary meetings, and in design meetings with the architects. She also proposed that a programme of creative collaborative workshops would be crucial to ensuring a building with spaces that worked for children and young people, in one of the most challenging experiences that they will have. This was carried out by Stone Opera, and produced a ground breaking process for inclusive design.
Thea is currently engaged in research and creative practices that explore and question the boundaries of architectural design. In her studio at Tribe Porty, she uses the process of making, repairing and constructing to re-narrate layering of memories into spaces of everyday use. She co-authored the chapter in Disability, Architecture,Space. ed. Jos Boys: The Ramp House: Building Inclusivity, with Katie Lloyd Thomas, where they examined how an inclusive space can be co-created through everyday use, and can also lead to a new understanding of inclusive design. She has given many public lectures about inclusive design, the Ramp House, and collaborative design, especially with children and young people.
In her free time, Thea likes to drum, box, lift weights, act, and write poetry.
