Where design and law meet - An empirical study for understanding legal design and its implication for research and practice
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School of Arts, Design and Architecture |
Master's thesis
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P1 OPINNÄYTTEET D 2019 Ji
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Authors
Date
2019
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Collaborative and Industrial Design
Language
en
Pages
112
Series
Abstract
This thesis explores the notion of legal design and proposes its process. The research, conducted through a literature review and expert interviews, provides both academic and empirical findings regarding the subject. Through the literature review, this thesis argues that legal design is an evolving discipline that incorporates many design methods into its framework. First, this study illustrates how the influence of design in the field of law led to the exploration of legal design. Regarding legal design, designerly thinking and doing, including visualization, human-centered design, the design thinking process, and participatory design methods, have been utilized to improve communication of legal documents as well as the user experience of legal services and legal systems. The changed perspective of viewing the mass as the end-user of the law rather than only legal experts and the collaborative, multidisciplinary exploration drives law and design professionals to explore a more radical form of collaboration—legal design—as a new research topic. In the process, the designer who becomes familiar with the legal context and the lawyer who learns designerly think-ing and doing can each claim to be a legal designer. Expert interviews offer empirical knowledge of real-world legal design practices. For instance, through the analysis of the seven collected case projects and expert interviews, this thesis illustrates the understanding of legal design from the standpoint of two parties—designers and lawyers. The insight being is to create a space for legal design at the intersection of design, law, and technology. To explore the space, a legal design process generated from the interviews is proposed. Based on the legal design process, this study suggests three roles designers should assume when engaged in a project with law stakeholders. This thesis also suggests embedding the system thinking within the legal design framework and encouraging the use of more service design methods in the legal design process in order to tackle the complexity of the legal challenges. This thesis conducts explorative research to understand legal design from a design researcher’s perspective. Thus, its limitations include the research methods, the selection of the interviewees, and the scope of the collected case projects. The legal design framework proposed in this study, therefore, needs to be further validated and supported by more comprehensive data.Description
Supervisor
Roto, VirpiThesis advisor
Lu, YichenKeywords
legal design, human-centered design, design thinking, legal visualization, participatory design, co-design