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 design process). The Ramp House has become a beacon of excellent inclusive design, being cited 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. Greta, now 20 years old, has cerebral palsy, and is a wheelchair user and an eyegaze computer user. Working as Greta’s creative co-ordinator and communication partner for over two decades has given Thea valuable skills in listening, communicating ideas, problem-solving, planning, and bigger picture strategising.
In the last year, Thea has designed and established 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 can be creatively 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 creative making and playing. She then incorporated this approach in first year architectural design at Edinburgh University, when she co-ran and re-wrote the first year syllabus, instigating creative workshops to explore different elements of the built environment, and a series of design lectures. She has recently returned to teaching architectural design, following a break to support her daughter.
As Design Director in Chambers McMillan Architects, Thea was responsible for client relations, brief writing, and co-design. Her practice strengths were in people skills, collaborative working and thinking, problem solving, 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 within Chambers McMillan Architects. A key part of the design process on specialist projects was designing a bespoke series of creative workshops which were for accessible children and young people with the many varied support needs.
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….meetings…. And ….she cowrote a set of design principles to ensure that families, and children and young people find their place within the design, and that supported families, 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, 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.
