Definitions

This podcast episode, hosted by Carol Hannud, is a comprehensive and very personal intro into legal design, told by four pioneers of the discipline -- through the lens of how they ended up working in this field and how they look at it:

• Colette R. Brunschwig from the University Zürich, who pioneered legal design in 1992 when exploring the visualisation of legal concepts
• Stefania Passera (known to many from her work on the juro.com privacy policy), who wanted to use her visual design skills for a purpose and ended up being "the black sheep surrounded by lawyers"
• Astrid Kohlmeier, a lawyer who looks back at a long career in insurance and law practice and got interested in getting a second degree in design after working a student job in ad agency.
• Marie Potel-Saville, who as an in-house lawyer saw old templates no longer fitting today's challenges.

In addition to their personal motivations for practising and promoting legal design, they are asked to attempt a "definition" of legal design and explain why they see that this emerging discipline matters.

My personal highlight is when Colette Brunschwig -- who explicitly tries to add "a very scholarly understanding" to the discussion states how legal design is a fuzzy term in the design discourse and that there are many sub-fields such as legal service design, legal interaction design, legal software design, legal product design, legal architecture design. There indeed is no one "legal design", and for example a discipline like "legal interaction design" sounds like something very much worth exploring further.

In this interview, Arianna Rossi summarizes her definition of "legal design" as

[…] an interdisciplinary approach that promotes human-centered design to prevent or solve legal problems, by prioritizing the point of views of all the users of law.

She highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, the preventive approach (avoiding legal risk by good design), and the broad audiences far beyond legal practitioners, and stresses how important it is to recognize that legal design, just as design in general, is about more than making things visually appealing. Then, she gives some examples how legal design can be applied in relation to data protection.

In closing, the focus shifts to the importance of legal design as a (still young) practice that generates evidence to build upon:

We have not only to investigate a legal issue, but also to demonstrate why one intervention works better than another one. One of the most important insights that we can learn from a human-centred design approach is this evidence-based attitude enabling us to say that something works because we are able to explain how, why and for whom it works.

An entire special issue of Design Issues dedicated to legal design as an emerging discipline! This (paywalled) journal contains a whole range of articles with perspectives on legal design:

• Margaret Hagan "Legal Design as a Thing: A Theory of Change and a Set of Methods to Craft a Human-Centered Legal System" (free to read)
• Dan Jackson, Miso Kim, Jules Rochielle Sievert "The Rapid Embrace of Legal Design and the Use of Co-Design to Avoid Enshrining Systemic Bias"
• Gordon Ross "Airlines, Mayonnaise, and Justice: Reflections on the Theory and Practice of Legal Design and Technology"
• Melissa A. Moss "The Escambia Project: An Experiment in Community-Led Legal Design"
• Margaret Hagan, F. Kürşat özenç "A Design Space for Legal and Systems Capability: Interfaces for Self-Help in Complex Systems"
• Arianna Rossi, Monica Palmirani "Can Visual Design Provide Legal Transparency? The Challenges for Successful Implementation of Icons for Data Protection"