Abi Scott
(she/her)
I am a human-centred designer and researcher exploring how storytelling, care and participation can strengthen connections within healthcare and community settings. My practice is grounded in qualitative research, co-design and speculative thinking, using emotionally driven design to respond to overlooked social experiences surrounding illness, caregiving and inclusion.
I’m particularly interested in lived experience research and how design can translate nuanced and often overlooked experiences into tactile, accessible and meaningful interactions. My work frequently combines physical and digital mediums to create participatory tools, services and storytelling experiences that encourage communication and shared understanding.
Much of my practice critiques dominant narratives surrounding caregiving and support structures, instead exploring softer and more emotionally sustainable alternatives. I’m interested in how design research can open conversations, challenge assumptions and create space for empathy, imagination and emotional reassurance within everyday life.
For me, design is about empathy and building a deeper understanding between people, systems and experiences that are often difficult to articulate.
RePlay – Self Initiated
RePlay is a phygital storytelling toolkit designed for families navigating chronic illness, fatigue and emotional absence. Through wearable tools and a connected digital archive, children observe and capture fragments of experiences an ill parent may not physically be present for, later revisiting and performing these moments together through embodied storytelling, theatrical play and imaginative interaction.
Developed through interviews and co-design conversations with mothers, carers, families and children, the project explores how emotional presence might be sustained through ritual, storytelling and memory-making when physical participation becomes unpredictable. Rather than positioning illness solely through loss or limitation, RePlay reframes care through moments of joy, creativity and adaptation.
Research revealed how chronic illness frequently intersects with cultural expectations surrounding motherhood, emotional availability and caregiving, with many participants describing feelings of guilt, emotional pressure and disconnection within family life. Conversations also highlighted how emotional silence surrounding illness often became more distressing than illness itself, particularly for children.
Rather than focusing solely on crisis or medical intervention, RePlay explores whether small emotionally supportive interactions and shared acts of creativity might help strengthen reassurance, trust and long-term emotional connection during periods of uncertainty and absence. By combining tactile interaction, co-design and storytelling, the project proposes softer and more emotionally sustainable approaches to caregiving and family support.
RePlay Kit and Archival Postcards
RePlay Kit In-Situ
1 // KeekPeek in use
2 // Tooteroo in use
3 // Shoogle in use
Story Recreation
Variety of data produced from different days out
Data Postcards stored within the dedicated app
quotes and insight from different perspectives of mothers
Micro Explorers – Creating Future Experiences // individual project
MicroExplorer Sessions is mobile library service supporting families to reconnect with the outdoors. As children’s access to the outdoors decrease and parental anxiety around germs rise – they miss out on healthy microbial exposure essential for immune development.
The MicroExplorer Kit includes the Listening Stone and a shared workbook, inviting children to lead the exploration by taking on a ‘Microbial Guardian’ role. The kit supports interacting with surfaces, discovering traces of unseen microbial life and storytelling their acts of exploration and discovery. Through these playful encounters adults relearn through their child’s curiosity and contribute to a citizen-led microbial map of Glasgow’s hidden ecosystems.
The project questions growing cultures of avoidance surrounding ‘dirt’ and microbial life, exploring how curiosity and playful interaction might help families rebuild trust in healthy everyday exposure and reconnect with the overlooked ecosystems around them.
Community-based sessions introduce families to the unseen microbial world
Families explore outdoor environments and observe unseen life
The listening stone collects microbial traces from surfaces through the form of a printed slip
Children review, draw and imagine the microbes they discover
