Gemma Teal, Tara French

Full Papers

Gemma Teal and Tara French are frequent collaborators based at the Innovation School at The Glasgow School of Art (GSA).

Gemma is a design researcher specializing in creative engagement, participatory design and visual methods within health and wellbeing contexts. Applying these approaches to reimagine new forms of support for self-management of long-term health conditions, her projects have focused on experiences of diagnosis and living with diabetes, new models of care for people living with multimorbidity, and the empowering potential of person-owned data. In the wider context of Public Health, she explores how participatory design enables and integrates multidisciplinary research collaborations to develop evidence-based interventions. She is co-Investigator on a number of Global Public Health Partnership projects aimed at developing community resilience interventions to prevent and respond to road traffic accidents in Malawi.

Tara is a design psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in facilitating transdisciplinary collaborations in the context of care and wellbeing. Her work combines multi-method and creative forms of engagement to meaningfully involve diverse groups of stakeholders in the design process, from people with lived experience to government policy makers. Tara’s research focuses on the role of design in enabling a culture of innovation and resilience in complex contexts. Her recent projects have involved large scale co-design in the context of transitions in palliative care and exploring design-led, system-wide innovation in the context of health and social care integration. Tara is interested in how design can foster spaces for empathic exploration and resilience when exploring ‘taboo’ or sensitive subjects.

Currently on leave of absence from GSA, Tara is exploring how participatory and human rights-based approaches can support transformation in the independent social care sector, having taken up a post with the representative body Scottish Care.