Research
Profile
I have a PhD in Computational Media Design from the University of Calgary, an MSc in Biomedical Ethics from McGill University, and over seven years of professional experience in qualitative healthcare research. I have experience in facilitating interviews, focus groups and workshops to better understand patient and caregiver perspectives in healthcare technology design.
Approach
I have a keen interest in participatory design methods and aim to integrate these approaches into my qualitative practice. My goal is to pair the flexibility and responsiveness of participatory design with the rigour and data quality of qualitative methods. My Ph.D. program allowed me to pursue my interest in participatory design, with the ultimate goal of studying the application of participatory design methods in healthcare.
Select Publications
Backåberg, S., Strandberg, S., Freeman, G., Katz, L., Rafiei Milajerdi, H., Wylant, B., Oehlberg, L. Ekstedt, M. (2025). Facilitating co-design among older adults in a digital setting: methodological challenges and opportunities. CoDesign, 21(1), 118–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2372595
Freeman, G., Losev, T., Carpendale, S., Wylant, B., & Oehlberg, L. (2023). Slow Data and Healthcare Co-design: Exploring tensions through duoethnography and data physicalization. Workshop Paper. Data as a Material for Design: Alternative Narratives, Divergent Pathways, and Future Directions. At the 2023Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23), Hamburg, Germany. https://materialfordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/22_CHI2023_MfD.pdf
Ivanov, A., Au Yeung, T., Blair, K., Danyluk, K., Freeman, G., Friedel, M., Hull, C., Hung, M., Pratte, S., & Willett, W. (2022). One Week in the Future: Previs Design Futuring for HCI Research. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22) Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 542, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517584
Freeman, G., & Brown, H.A. (2022). Technology co-design in context: A Walk and Talk with Gina Freeman. Heliotrope. https://www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/technology-codesign-walk-and-talk
Asha, A. Z., Smith, C., Freeman, G., Crump, S., Somanath, S., Oehlberg, L., & Sharlin, E. (2021). Co-Designing Interactions between Pedestrians in Wheelchairs and Autonomous Vehicles. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS’21), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 339–351. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462068