Legal Design as a Thing: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Legal Design as a Thing:
A Theory of Change and
a Set of Methods to Craft a
Human-Centered Legal System
Margaret Hagan

Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Notas
on Its Nature and Use,” Design Research
Quarterly 1, No. 2 (2006): 16–27; Tim
Marrón, “Design Thinking,” Harvard
Business Review (Junio 2008): 85–92;
Charles Owen, “Design Thinking: Driving
Innovation,” BPM Strategies Magazine,
The Business Process Management
Instituto, Septiembre 2006; y ricardo
Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design
Thinking,” Design Issues 8, No. 2 (Primavera
1992): 5–21. doi.org/10.2307/1511637.
Colette Brunschwig, “On Visual Law:
Visual Legal Communication Practices
and Their Scholarly Exploration,” in
Zeichen Und Zauber Des Rechts:
Festschrift Für Friedrich Lachmayer
[Signs and Magic of the Rights:
Commemorative for Friedrich Lachmayer]
eds. Erich Schweihofer et al. (Berna:
Editions Weblaw, 2014), 899–933;
Véronique Fraser and Jean-François
Roberge, “Legal Design Lawyering:
Rebooting Legal Business Model with
Design Thinking,” Pepperdine Dispute
Resolution Law Journal 16, No. 2008
(2016): 303-dieciséis; Jamie Young, A Virtual
Day in Court: Design Thinking and Virtual
Tribunales (Londres: RSA, 2011); Victor
Quintanilla, “Human-Centered Civil
Justice Design,” Penn State Law Review
121, No. 3 (2017): 745–806; and Mark
Szabo, “Design Thinking in Legal Practice
Management,” Design Management
Revisar 21, No. 3 (Septiembre 29, 2010):
44–6.

3 Margaret Hagan, “The State of Legal
Diseño: The Big Takeaways of the
Stanford Law + Design Summit,” Legal
Design and Innovation, Septiembre 25,
2017, https://medium.com/legal-design-
and-innovation/the-state-of-legal-design-
the-big-takeaways-of-the-stanford-law-

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00600

Introducción
Human-centered design has been a dominant innovation method-
ology in service industries, from medicine to insurance to finance.1
It has now come to the legal system, together with movements
related to legal technology, legal hacking, and access to justice
reforma, as a collective legal design movement.2

University labs, conferences, classes, and new job positions
are oriented around “legal design”—the marriage of a human-cen-
tered design approach to the challenges and structures of the legal
system.3 This burgeoning community of people is interested in
using a design approach to improve the legal system.4 In light of
this growth, the need arises for more rigor: rigor in how a design
process is applied, in how design research is conducted, and in
how the outcomes of this process and research are evaluated. Fur-
ther discussion is needed to ground this design work, cual es
often creative, decentralized, and open, in an essential set of meth-
ods and instruments. These parameters can ensure honest reflec-
tion on how well the design approach can serve the legal system,
improve people’s access to justice, and promote innovation in this
professional community.

This special issue presents pieces from lawyers, designers,
technologists, eruditos, and community organizers that detail what
legal design is in practice. The pieces demonstrate how the craft of
legal design is developing as one that combines a community-
oriented co-design ethos, with a commitment to navigating the
bureaucracies of the legal system to effect change, and with the
integration of empirical research to evaluate whether user-centered
design and policy proposals do, En realidad, improve people’s outcomes.
Before readers dive into this collection of cases, this intro-
ductory piece gives some initial grounding. It offers an initial legal
design process, set of research methodologies and instruments,
and grounding in analogous fields and literature. It also offers
a wider theory of change—of how a design approach can feed into

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improved legal services, policy-making, and civic interactions
between people and government. This initial vision of a rigorous
design and research methodology for the legal system is a first
versión; researchers and practitioners can refine it as they learn the
best methods to use in specific legal contexts. As an initial archi-
tecture, it aims to open a conversation around rigorous human-
centered experiments to improve the legal system. It also seeks to
engender a willingness among those working on design, technol-
ogia, and innovation in law to hold themselves accountable with a
commitment to strong research and evaluation standards.

A Design Approach to Legal System Innovation
Legal design is a nascent movement to make the legal system
work better for people.5 It has been developed out of work in
human-centered and visual design, civic technology, and partici-
patory policy-making. It brings a lawyerly focus on abstract com-
plejidades (p.ej., what rights we have, what risks we face, what rules
constrain us) with a designerly focus on lived experience (how we
do things, how things look and feel to us, how things serve us).
Both the lawyerly focus and designerly focus share a core similar-
idad: to strategically improve people’s outcomes in a system, to solve
problemas complejos, to be in service.

Legal design seeks the improvement of the legal system
on multiple fronts: It wants to make the system more accessible to
lay people who must use it to resolve problems with money, hous-
En g, and family; it has in view corporate professionals who use the
system to contract, litigate, and conduct business; and it serves pol-
icy-makers and government officials who use the system to set
standards, hold powerful interests accountable, and enforce com-
pliance based on rights and obligations.

The purpose of legal design is to develop a human-centered,
participatory approach to reforming the legal system—one that
recognizes the importance of new technology but that does not
privilege it as the main way to innovate. The approach weaves
together design of documents, products, services, spaces, políticas,
and laws to make systemic changes that still pay close attention
to front-line realities. It recognizes the value of having interdisci-
plinary, inclusive groups build and test new improvements to the
sistema. Legal design draws on the creative exploration and making
of design work, along with the systems thinking and analysis of
legal work.

The wider theory of change for a design-driven approach
to law is that cascading layers of efforts are needed for transforma-
tive impact. The entry points could be diverse and multi-channel.
Por ejemplo, one flow could look as follows:

design-summit-ee363b5bf109; and Nora
Al Haider, “The Legal Design Summit
Recap: Uncharted Territory,” Legal Design
and Innovation, Enero 1, 2018, https://
medium.com/legal-design-and-innova-
tion/the-legal-design-summit-recap-
uncharted-territory-77d8795315cc.
See the Legal Design Alliance at https://
www.legaldesignalliance.org/ (accedido
Febrero 20, 2020).
Legal Design Alliance (website), "El
Legal Design Manifesto," 2018, https://
www.legaldesignalliance.org/.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

1. Broader, participatory network. A diverse group of
professionals (beyond lawyers) and the public are

involved in discussions and design of how to reform
the legal system, through design events.

2. Human-centered research of needs and opportunities. Este
interdisciplinary, participatory network can conduct
research into what people’s needs and opportunities are
regarding the legal system. This research might consider
justiciable events, experiential and process problems,
and usability breakdowns. It also involves legal mapping,

to understand the rules, políticas, and legislation that
define the current system and that might be levers for

future interventions.

3. Exploratory designs. The research defines an agenda
regarding new products, services, and policies that can
make the legal system work better for people. Groups in
university labs, public institutions, foundations, pequeño
companies, and large existing legal and professional
services companies develop and test-run these new

improvements, using the research to guide them. Este
step involves exploratory design and research. Often in
legal design, these test runs mix the introduction of new
frontline programs (p.ej., communications, products,
tecnología, services, and spaces) with reform of backend
estructuras (p.ej., normas, laws, regulatory structures, normas,
and policies).
4. Field pilots and evaluation. The new interventions and
policies that test well in the exploratory stage are then
refined sufficiently to be piloted in the field. People’s
experiences and outcomes are evaluated to determine
whether they increase both the level and quality of

justice and the efficiency and usability of the system.

Outcomes might include people’s ability to resolve

issues promptly, fully, and collaboratively. They also
might relate to people’s ability to comprehend and act

in the legal system.

5. Scale and replication. The piloted interventions and
policies that are shown through observational and
controlled trials to have positive outcome are then
scaled and replicated and established as the new
standard for how the legal system should operate.
6. Long-term evaluation. In a longer timeframe, el
implementations can be evaluated for larger,

downstream implications. Studies can determine
whether they improve rule of law, alleviate poverty,
improve quality of life, improve the economy, y
improve people’s relationships with the justice system

and with government more widely.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

This vision of legal design serves to launch new policy reforms,
technology interventions, and service and visual design initiatives
that can improve the legal system. Users of legal design approach
should have a commitment to a participatory public involvement;
dedicated focus on people’s experiences and outcomes; experi-
mentation with technology, services, visuals, and policy design;
and gradual refinement of new solutions that pair creative innova-
tion theory with evidence-based policymaking. In addition to
laying out potential effects and outcomes of legal design, this the-
ory of change provides the base architecture for methods that can
be used to produce them. Each phase of legal design work entails
different sets of methodologies to do rigorous, rich work. The next
sections go through each phase to discuss specific methods.

Methods for Legal Design Work
The heart of legal design is the human-centered design process,
which involves a basic sequence of design work.6 It begins with a
phase of seeking to understand a challenge area (or possible areas
for reform) through interviews, ethnography, observaciones, datos
gathering, and exploratory workshops. The process then moves
toward synthesizing specific user personas, needs statements,
requirements lists, and design briefs. Brainstorming, speculative
designs, collaborative co-design, and early rough prototyping
follow to begin trying out new ways to resolve the defined chal-
lenge. This expansive creativity then gradually moves toward
specific prototypes, which are tested for usability, experiencia,
and feasibility. Prototypes are gradually refined toward pilots
through testing and co-design, which leads toward pilots and
scaled implementations.

Although the human-centered design process has grown
in prominence as an innovation method, it is not often grounded
in academic or rigorous methodology. Legal design, at this early
stage of its development, can be more intentional about how and
why it is practiced. Like many other fields that also use a design-
driven approach to generate new interventions and knowledge—
like social innovation, human–computer interaction, investigación
through design, design for dignity, and participatory design—
legal design can create a hybrid of methodologies that leads to
practical and academic results. If the goal of legal design is to cre-
ate not just new innovations, but innovations that can be piloted
and can form the basis for evidence-based reforms and policy-
making in the justice system, then a heightened level of attention to
methodology is necessary.

See more detailed descriptions of this
process in Brown, “Design Thinking”;
Lucy Kimbell and Joe Julier, The Social
Design Methods Menu (Londres: Fieldstu-
dio, Octubre 2012), 1–56; and Lisa Carl-
gren et al., “Framing Design Thinking:
The Concept in Idea and Enactment,"
Creativity and Innovation Management
25, No. 1 (2016): 38–57.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

Participatory and Cross-Disciplinary Innovation Communities
At the initial stage of legal design work—of bringing a wider com-
munity into the agenda-setting, creation, and evaluation of new
innovations in the justice system—the methodology centers on cre-
ating a more participatory and interdisciplinary group of stake-
holders who are involved in the design process.

Methods from participatory design offer particularly helpful
guidance in this phase.7 This version of a design process integrates
more stakeholders into decision-making roles during exploratory
research and design. This integration occurs through collaborative
workshops, design camps, community awards, co-design sessions,
making and prioritization games, and other methods that allow
for a wider variety of people to participate in design.8 The methods
are often dynamic and interactive. Participatory methods are qual-
itative, generative tools for research into people’s needs, creating
new concepts and setting the agenda.9

Participatory action research in law and elsewhere also puts
community members at the center of new reform efforts.10 The
methods include holding concept mapping workshops to let vari-
ous groups and people think through power relationships, current
proceso, and visions of how the system could be better. Otro
methods include asset mapping (to identify common strengths and
talents outside the formal institutions), appreciative inquiry to
build a resource map of how leaders can better draw on the com-
munity, and seeing issues from a different perspective when prior-
itizing community resources. Fishbone diagrams, that lay out
sequences of actions and people into a backbone and offshoots,
reveal root causes to symptoms and surface dynamics—can be
used in a group setting to understand true problems and needs, como
well as to build better community relationships around common
points of view.

Photovoice is a more distributed method (outside of a work-
shop), in which community members take photos and collect
images to bring to the group to represent the challenge being dis-
cussed. These images initiate an analytic conversation about com-
munity experiences and needs.

Other work from open government, such as participatory
budgeting and other methods, involve the citizenry in government
reform and can serve as analogous inspiration for legal designers.11
Ongoing consultations and creative interactions between elected
officials, members of the public, and career government workers
can cross over from formal, rigid public consultations to more col-
laborative, open-ended, and creative design work.12 This outcome
also motivates open contracting—a process that could be adapted to
other government functions.13

Ezio Manzini and Francesca Rizzo, “Small
Projects/Large Changes: Participatory
Design as an Open Participated Process,"
CoDesign 7, No. 3–4 (2011): 199–215.
Elizabeth Sanders, “From User-Centered
to Participatory Design Approaches,” in
Design and the Social Sciences, ed. j.
Frascara (Londres: taylor & Francisco, 2002),
1–8.
Veronica Donoso et al., Increasing User
Empowerment Through Participatory and
Co-Design Methodologies (Bruselas:
EMSOC, 2014); and Clay Spinuzzi, "El
Methodology of Participatory Design,"
Technical Communication 52, No. 2
(2005): 163–74.

10 Emily Houh and Kristin Kalsen, “It’s Criti-
California: Legal Participatory Action Research,"
Michigan Journal of Race & Law 19, No.
2 (2014): 287–347.

11 Anirudh Dinesh, “Participatory Budgeting
and Civic Innovation in the Digital Age,"
GovLab Blog, Marzo 15, 2016, http://
thegovlab.org/participatory-budgeting-
and-civic-innovation-in-the-digital-
age-2/; and Sónia Gonçalves, "El
Effects of Participatory Budgeting on
Municipal Expenditures and Infant Mor-
tality in Brazil,” World Development 53
(2014): 94–110.

12 Julie Simon et al., NESTA Digital Democ-
racy: The Tools Transforming Political
Compromiso (Londres: NESTA, 2017).
13 Open Contracting Partnership, Open Con-
tracting: A Guide for Practitioners By
Practitioners (Washington, corriente continua: Open
Contracting Partnership, 2013).

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

The burgeoning movement in open government and participatory
social services, along with policy labs and living labs, provides a rich
array of tested methods that legal designers can borrow when
expanding the stakeholders included in justice reform.14 These
labs have developed models to combine more interdisciplinary
professional teams and to tackle challenges using hybrid method-
ologies that cross traditional barriers. The policy labs’ ways of
structuring innovation teams, of consulting with the public, y de
shepherding creative work from exploration to pilot all can serve
as blueprints for legal design work.15

Human-Centered Research into Legal Needs and Opportunities
In the second phase of legal design work, which involves under-
standing what a human-centered agenda of legal reform should be,
the methodologies focus more on uncovering needs and prioritiz-
ing opportunities.

The literature focusing on legal needs surveys describes a
more quantitative approach to integrate into this understanding of
needs.16 These surveys begin to categorize areas of justiciable
events that people have and to offer some understanding of pat-
charranes, grupos, and people’s behavior in response to these legal
problemas. They reveal large-scale trends that can guide more
micro-level design research.

Research methods focusing on large-scale trends and partic-
ular user-generated content on various Internet services—methods
that are used by those working on social innovation, political activ-
ismo, and public health—can also help legal designers to better
understand needs and opportunities. Methods to audit search
results can be used to understand how people are interacting with
legal services online.17 Bots, crowdsourcing, and online classifica-
tion tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) also can be used
by researchers to spot, count, and characterize people who are
expressing needs while on social media (p.ej., on Twitter, Google,
and other platforms).18

Design research methods bring a more grounded, quali-
tative understanding of needs and experience. Applied ethnography
is a primary technique used for legal design research into user
necesidades. It entails either observations of people in legal institutions,
doing legal tasks, or researchers’ going through the processes
ellos mismos (either shadowing litigants or professionals, o debajo-
taking the legal tasks themselves).19 This technique also can involve
stakeholders who do collaborative design, mapping their journey,
in situ acting and improvisation of scenarios, self-recording
diaries, sharing of their artifacts, and interacting with props and
playful mock-ups.20 The goal is to find people in the context of the

14 Christian Bason, “Discovering Co-Produc-
tion by Design,” Public and Collaborative:
Exploring the Intersection of Design,
Social Innovation, and Public Policy, eds.
Ezio Manzini and Eduardo Staszowski
(Nueva York: DESIS, 2013): vii–1.
15 Christian Bason et al., “How Public

Diseño?,” in Copenhagen Design Week
2011 Actas (Copenhague: Mente-
Lab, 2011); Lucy Kimbell, Applying
Design Approaches to Policy Making:
Discovering Policy Lab (Brighton:
Universidad de Brighton, 2015); and Mónica
Edwards-Schachter et al., “Fostering
Quality of Life Through Social Innovation:
A Living Lab Methodology Study Case,"
Review of Policy Research 29, No. 6
(Noviembre 2012): 672–92.

16 Pascoe Pleasance et al., “Paths to
Justicia: A Past, Present and Future
Roadmap” (Londres: Centre for Empirical
Legal Studies, 2013); Rebecca L.
Sandefur, “Accessing Justice in the
Contemporary USA: Findings from the
Community Needs and Services Study,"
American Bar Association (2014); y
Peter Chapman and Alejandro Ponce,
“How Do We Measure Access to
Justicia? A Global Survey of Legal
Needs Shows the Way,” Open Society
Foundations (Marzo 2018).

17 Ronald E. Robertson et al., “Auditing

the Personalization and Composition of
Politically-Related Search Engine Results
Pages,” in WWW ’18: Actas de la
2018 World Wide Web Conference (Nuevo
york: ACM, 2018), 955–65.

18 Eiji Aramaki et al., “Twitter Catches the

Flu : Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using
Twitter,” Proceedings of the 2011 Estafa-
ference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Procesamiento del lenguaje (Edimburgo: Associ-
ation for Computational Linguistics, 2011):
1568–76; Patipat Susumpow et al.,
“Participatory Disease Detection Through
Digital Volunteerism: How the Doctorme
Application Aims to Capture Data for
Faster Disease Detection in Thailand,"
in WWW ’14 Companion: Actas
of the 23rd International Conference
on World Wide Web (Nueva York: ACM,
2014), 663–66; and Jeremy Ginsberg et
Alabama., “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using
Search Engine Query Data," Naturaleza 457,
No. 7232 (2009): 1012–14.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

19 Margaret D. Hagan, “A Human-Centered
Design Approach to Access Justice:
Generating New Prototypes and
Hypotheses for Intervention to Make
Courts User-Friendly,” Indiana Journal
of Law and Social Equality 6, No. 2
(2018): 199–239; and Indi Young,
Mental Models Aligning Design Strategy
with Human Behavior (San Francisco,
California: Rosenfeld Media, 2008).

20 Salu Ylirisku and Jacob Buur, Designing
with Video (Nueva York: Saltador, 2009);
and Jacob Buur and Larisa Sitorus,
“Ethnography as Design Provocation,"
in Ethnographic Praxis in Industry
Conference Proceedings (Portland:
American Anthropological Association,
2007), 146–57.

21 Corina Sas et al., “Generating Implica-
tions for Design Through Design
Investigación,” Proceedings of the 32nd
Annual ACM Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14)
(Nueva York: ACM, 2014), 1971–80.
22 Margaret Hagan, Law By Design

(stanford: Legal Design Lab, 2016) en
http://www.lawbydesign.co/en/home/
(accessed February 20, 2020).
23 Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss,

“Grounded Theory Research,” Qualitative
Sociology 13, No. 1 (1990): 3–21.

24 Shamal Faily and Ivan Flechais, “Persona
Cases: A Technique for Grounding
Personas,” CHI ’11 Proceedings of the
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (Nueva York: ACM,
2011), 2267–70.

25 Felicity Hasson and Sinead Keeney,
“Enhancing Rigour in the Delphi
Technique Research,” Technological
Forecasting and Social Change 78, No. 9
(2011): 1695–1704; and Jari Kaivo-oja
et al., “The Crowdsourcing Delphi:
Combining the Delphi Methodology and
Crowdsourcing Techniques,” in The XXIV
ISPIM Conference – Innovating in Global
Markets: Challenges for Sustainable
Growth (Helsinki: ISPIM, 2013), 1–18.
26 Amber Fletcher and Gregory Marchildon,
“Using the Delphi Method for Qualitative,
Participatory Action Research in Health
Leadership,” International Journal of
Qualitative Methods 13, No. 1 (2014):
1–18.

27 Guillermo Aldunate et al., “Doing User
Research in the Courts on the Future of
Access to Justice,” Legal Design and

system who are trying to use the system through its technologies,
normas, interfaces, idioma, and services and then to gather infor-
mation from them by triggering a reflective process that can
expose what their deeper needs and aspirations are. The ethno-
graphic techniques bring thick, rich descriptions of how people
currently are trying to use the legal system (or to serve others in
the system) and of the possible hooks or policy changes that are
called for.21 They can produce coded interview notes, journey maps
of individual users, swimlane diagrams that map out multiple
stakeholders’ experiences, lists of user requirements, anotado
system maps prioritizing stakeholders and problems, and other
artifacts to capture the status quo.22

Grounded theory offers a related method for collecting a vari-
ety of interviews, observaciones, and other data points, and using
them to synthesize common patterns and themes.23 The grounded
theory qualitative approach to social science considers phenomena
as perpetually changing—and it works to uncover what these con-
ditions are, how people respond to them, and the consequences of
this action. Its methodologies involve wide data collection—from
interviews, observaciones, and secondary accounts—and then grad-
ual development of codes, categories, relaciones, and themes in
this data. Insights and hypotheses are derived from a sample of on-
the-ground conditions and experiences, so that the researcher (o
legal designer) is grounded in these human realities when propos-
ing what the status quo of the legal system is, the main categories
of people involved, and potential next steps.24

A more structured, quantitative form of user need scouting
can be borrowed from futurist and forecast studies, which use the
Delphi method to source an agenda from multiple leaders. The Del-
phi technique involves having multiple experts react to a prompt,
to forecast what they predict will happen in the future and to offer
a vision for what should happen.25 It has been used in health care
for participatory agenda-setting and to structure group communi-
cation around how to solve a complex problem.26 This forecasting
method can be adapted to a wider group of stakeholders (not only
legal experts) to solicit visions from more people about where they
would spend resources to improve the legal system—for example,
by ranking needs and opportunities and by participating in fic-
tional games that would allocate funds to the stakeholders.27

Methods for Creating Exploratory Designs
In moving from the understanding of needs to the creation of new
ideas and prototypes for improvement, the methodologies involve
more creative, speculative, and building-focused work.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

The Research Through Design community in human-com-
puter interaction (HCI) has established a set of grounded method-
ologies to create early-stage prototypes as a means to inquire into
user needs and contexts.28 Design researchers approach complex,
wicked problem areas—with many different stakeholders and
competing priorities—using methods that involve building new
artifacts, testing them, and collaborative iteration to revise them,
and through this process developing stronger theories, hypotheses,
and visions of change.29 These efforts often are long-term research
projects, involving repeated investigations and multiple rounds of
creation, theory-creation, and re-creation of new interventions. El
design team creates testable hypotheses about how to address the
defined challenge by creating early prototypes, testing them, y
then revising their hypothesis and their prototype accordingly.30

Creating these new exploratory designs involves a wide
variety of practical design methods for brainstorming, prototyp-
En g, and running early-stage testing or collaborative design
reviews. Human-centered design toolkits offer concrete methods for
running brainstorming sessions, including creative matrices, anal-
ogous research, improvisation and bodystorming, interdisciplinary
brainstorms, and crowdsourced open innovation competitions.31
Service design methods are of particular use in legal design, a
research people’s needs and system dynamics and to transform the
research into new ways to provide services through technology,
organizational changes, políticas, visuals, and other coordinated
interventions.32 These research activities involve brainstorming to
create early prototypes, like storyboards, proposed blueprints,
sketches of new ideas and products, acting out new experiences
and interactions, and hacking current spaces with quick new
visions of what could be different.33

In legal design, the typical product or service design proto-
types also expand to include Policy Prototyping, as has been estab-
lished in other public service innovation methodologies.34 This
approach involves taking the sketching, building, and improvisa-
tion of more traditional early-stage prototyping to a more complex,
system-level experiment on how things can be changed. A policy
prototype in public service innovation involves creating visual,
servicio, and product prototypes—in addition to prototypes of new
policies—to run a series of small experiments to test what behav-
iors, risks, and other unexpected outcomes emerge from these
changes.35 This nascent expansion of design methods into policy-
making can be used by legal designers to conduct more explor-
atory, pre-pilot work in how court rules, legislation, regulación, y
other policies can be reformed.

Innovation, Julio 5, 2018, https://medio.
com/legal-design-and-innovation/
doing-user-research-in-the-courts-on-the-
future-of-access-to-justice-cb7a75dc3a4b
(accessed on February 20, 2020).
28 John Zimmerman et al., “An Analysis

and Critique of Research Through Design:
Towards a Formalization of a Research
Acercarse,” Conference on Designing
Interactive Systems (Aarhus: ACM, 2010),
310–19.

29 John Zimmerman et al., “Research

Through Design as a Method for Inter-
action Design Research in HCI,” CHI ’07:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference
on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(Nueva York: ACM, 2007), 493–502.
30 David V. Keyson and Miguel Bruns

alonso, “Empirical Research Through
Diseño,” Proceedings of the 3rd Confer-
ence of the International Association of
Societies of Design Research (IASDR’09):
Rigor and Relevance in Design (Seoul,
Korea: IASDR, 2009), 4548–57.
31 Luma Institute, Innovating for People:
Handbook of Human-Centered Design
Métodos (pittsburgh, Pensilvania: Luma, 2012);
CoLab, Follow the Rabbit: A Field Guide
to Systemic Design (toronto: Ryerson,
2016); and Ursula Davies and Kelly
wilson, Design Methods for Developing
Services (Londres: Colaborativismo, 2013).

32 Marc Stickdorn et al., This Is Service
Design Doing (San Francisco: O’Reilly,
2017).

33 Kimbell and Julier, “Social Design,"

45–50.

34 Lucy Kimbell and Jocelyn Bailey,

“Prototyping and the New Spirit of
Policy-Making,” CoDesign 13, No. 3 (Julio
3, 2017): 214–26; Verena Kontschieder,
“Prototyping in Policy—What For?!,"
Legal Design and Innovation, Octubre 16,
2018, https://medium.com/legal-design-
and-innovation/prototyping-in-policy-
what-for-c7c567d922ec (accedido
Febrero 20, 2020); and Lorenzo Allio,
Design Thinking for Public Service
Excellence (Singapur: UNDP, 2014).
35 Margaret Hagan, “Quick Takes on How to
Bring Prototyping into Policy-Making,"
Legal Design and Innovation, Noviembre
15, 2018, https://medium.com/legal-
design-and-innovation/quick-takes-on-
how-to-bring-prototyping-into-policy-
making-cc720f306d93 (accedido
Febrero 20, 2020).

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

36 Jakob Trischler et al., “The Value of
Codesign: The Effect of Customer
Involvement in Service Design Teams,"
Journal of Service Research 21, No. 1
(2018): 75–100; and Sofia Hussain et al.,
“Participatory Design with Marginalized
People in Developing Countries:
Challenges and Opportunities Experi-
enced in a Field Study in Cambodia,"
International Journal of Design 6,
No. 2 (2012): 91–109.

37 Donoso et al., Increasing User

Empowerment.

38 André Liem and Elizabeth B.N. Lijadoras,
“The Impact of Human-Centred Design
Workshops in Strategic Design Projects,"
in Lecture Notes in Computer Science
(Including Subseries Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes
in Bioinformatics) 6776 (Berlina: LNCS,
2011): 110–19.

39 Elizabeth B.N. Lijadoras, “Perspectives
on Participation in Design,” in Wer
Gestaltet Die Gestaltung? Praxis, Theorie
Und Geschichte Des Partizipatorischen
Designs [Who Designs the Design?
Practice, Teoría, and History of Participa-
tory Design] (Berlina: Transcript, 2008),
61–74.

40 Laurens Boer and Jared Donovan,

“Provotypes for Participatory Innovation,"
in DIS ’12: Proceedings of the Designing
Interactive Systems Conference (Nuevo
york: ACM Press, 2012), 388.

41 Buur and Sitorious, “Ethnography as

Design Provocation.”

42 Florian Schaub et al., “A Design

Space for Effective Privacy Notices,” in
Eleventh Symposium on Usable Privacy
and Security (SOUPS 2015) (berkeley:
USENIX Association, 2015), 1–17; Helena
Haapio and Margaret Hagan, “Design
Patterns for Contracts,” Internationales
Rechtsinformatik Symposion IRIS
[International Legal Informatics
Symposium] (Viena: Weblaw, 2016):
381–88; and Helena Haapio et al.,
“Legal Design Patterns for Privacy,” in
Data Protection/LegalTech: Actas
of the 21st International Legal
Informatics Symposium IRIS, ed. Erich
Schweighofer (Viena: Weblaw,
2018), 445–50.

Co-design supplements these generative methods by prioritizing
the inclusion of a wide group of stakeholders in the brainstorming
and prototyping.36 It offers methods to expand these creative activ-
ities to more amateur community members or system leaders (OMS
typically do not think of themselves as creative).37 Co-design often
happens in workshops in which experienced designers and devel-
opers are paired with amateur ones, but with everyone sketching,
discussing, and building together. The more skilled designers and
developers then begin to translate the group’s vision into a refined
exploratory design.38

The strand of methodologies around speculative design offers
ways to explore possible interventions that may not yet be feasible,
but that can help stretch the community’s vision, challenge their
prejuicios, and think in longer timelines. Rather than aiming at imme-
diate practicality (solving the problem right now), this branch of
design methods encourages the generation of knowledge through
the design of new interventions that are provocative, that can elicit
reactions to help the design team better understand what the limits
of a design space are.39 Speculative design, sometimes called provo-
typing (rather than prototyping, for its provocative nature), is then
used to have a critical conversation or co-design workshop.40 Stake-
holders thus engage with a challenging vision of what could be,
and the design team can push the vision of interventions to be more
ambitious, to think beyond immediate realities, and to also see
what the boundaries of acceptable new interventions would be.41

Design pattern libraries also are a useful tool and methodol-
ogy during the creation phase of legal design work. Numerous
design patterns already have been proposed around specific legal
objectives—particularly regarding communication of complex
information via contracts, policy statements, and terms of service.42
The pattern library is a means to facilitate the creation of new in-
terventions based on previous vetted practices and to jumpstart
effective design work. The patterns are most common in visual
communication and interaction designs, although legal design also
might work to expand the design pattern method into other sys-
temic areas, to capture best practices and standard forms of service
and policy innovation.

Early Evaluation of New Designs
As many concepts and prototypes emerge from the creative phase,
the next set of methodologies get early, meaningful evaluation of
which designs should advance to pilot. Feedback clarifies how to
make them more engaging and usable, what risks and ethical
concerns might emerge out of them, and how they can be refined

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

before being “hardened” into pilots. The methods of evaluation at
this stage vary depending on the type of legal “thing” being
designed. Is the intervention a new communication, product, ser-
vicio, organización, or policy, Por ejemplo? Specific instruments can
be used to evaluate these different types of prototypes, a pesar de
common themes cross all areas of early-stage legal design work.

For all legal design work, the usability of a new innovation is
a central criterion. Other public service innovation design method-
ologies have been developed to evaluate new communications,
tecnología, and services based on system usability.43 Standard
surveys are available to measure system usability; they include
fewer than 10 survey questions to reliably elicit feedback from pos-
sible users of a new prototype about whether the thing makes the
system more or less usable for them.44 These usability surveys also
can begin to measure whether stakeholders’ experience and confi-
dence with the new prototype will be positive. Usability studies
look at ease of learning a new intervention, efficiency of using it,
and the speed and accuracy in performing tasks with it.45 Beyond
usability, other government technology researchers also have
developed research methods to gauge technology acceptance, moti-
vational models to gauge people’s motivation for using new inter-
ventions, and other measures to determine how to roll out new
interventions that will affect whether and how people use them.46

Procedural justice is another area for legal design evaluation.
Even if a prototype makes the legal system more usable, does it
also improve people’s sense of being treated with respect and dig-
nity within the system? Does it improve their sense of confidence
in their ability to interact with the government, and their sense of
faith in the government’s effectiveness and rule of law? Procedural
justice instruments, developed primarily in relation to police–
citizen relationships, can be useful to legal designers.47 They are
short surveys that ask respondents about their relationship with a
government institution and can be adapted to evaluate a proposed
new intervention: Would this new thing improve or exacerbate the
procedural justice factors?48

Related to the justice measures are methods to measure
Design for Dignity. These instruments, mainly taken from the study
of health care (particularly end-of-life palliative care), measure
indicators of people’s experiences, confidence, and perceived
control in a system.49 Dignity often is measured using the concept
of “perceived control,” in which users’ experience measures are not
only about happiness and satisfaction, but also about their sense
of being treated with care, their knowledge of the complicated
sistema, and their confidence that they have quality choices and

43 Zhao Huang and Laurence Brooks,

“Usability Evaluation and Redesign
of E-Government: Users’ Centred
Acercarse,” in Recent Advances in
Computer Science and Information
Ingeniería: Lecture Notes in Electrical
Ingeniería, eds. z. Qian et al. (Berlina:
Saltador, 2012): 615–25; Lili Wang et al.,
“Evaluating Web-Based e-Government
Services with a Citizen-Centric
Acercarse,” in 38th Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences (Grande
Island, HI: IEEE, 2005): 1–10; and Cora
Sio Kuan Lai and Guilherme Pires, “Test-
ing of a Model Evaluating E-Government
Portal Acceptance and Satisfaction,"
The Electronic Journal of Information
Systems Evaluation 13, No. 1 (2010):
35–46.

44 Aaron Bangor et al., “An Empirical
Evaluation of the System Usability
Scale,” International Journal of Human–
Computer Interaction 24, No. 6 (Julio
2008): 574–94.

45 Hyewon Suh et al., “Developing and
Validating the User Burden Scale,” in
CHI ’16: Actas de la 2016
CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (Nueva York: ACM,
2016), 3988–99.

46 Ben-Tzion Karsh, “Beyond Usability:

Designing Effective Technology Imple-
mentation Systems to Promote Patient
Safety,” in Quality and Safety in Health
Care (Madison, Wisconsin: BMJ Publishing
Group, Octubre 2004), 388–94.
47 Jason Sunshine and Tom R. tyler,

“The Role of Procedural Justice and
Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for
Policing,” Law & Society Review 37, No.
3 (Septiembre 1, 2003): 513–48; Tom
R. tyler, “Procedural Justice and the
Tribunales,” Court Review: The Journal
of the American Judges Association 44,
No. 1/2 (2007): 26–31; Roger K. Warren,
“Public Trust and Procedural Justice,"
Court Review (Caer 2000): 12-dieciséis; Steve
Leben, “Procedural-Fairness Movement
Comes of Age,” Trends in State Courts
(Williamsburgh, National Center for State
Tribunales, 2014), 59–62; and Margaret
Hagan and Miso Kim, “Design for Dignity
and Procedural Justice,” in AFHE 2017:
Advances in Affective and Pleasurable
Diseño, eds. W.. Chung et al. (Berlina:
Saltador, 2018):135–45.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

48 Al sr. tyler, “What Is Procedural
Justicia?: Criteria Used By Citizens
to Assess the Fairness of Legal
Procedures,” Law & Society Review 22,
No. 1 (1988): 103–36.

49 Mariska G. Vlug et al., “The Development
of an Instrument to Measure Factors That
Influence Self-Perceived Dignity," Diario
of Palliative Medicine 14, No. 5 (Puede
2011): 578–86.

50 Beth Arburn Davis, “Development and

Validation of a Scale of Perceived Control
Across Multiple Domains," (PhD diss.,
Philadelphia College of Osteopathic
Medicamento, 2004).

51 Christopher A. Le Dantec and W. Keith
Edwards, “Designs on Dignity: Percep-
tions of Technology on the Homeless,"
in CHI ’08 Proceedings: Design in Dignity
(Nueva York: ACM, 2008), 627–36; y
Asam Almohamed and Dhaval Vyas,
“Designing for the Marginalized: A
Step Towards Understanding the Lives
of Refugees and Asylum Seekers,” in
DIS 2016 Companion: Actas de la
2016 ACM Conference on Designing
Interactive Systems (Nueva York: ACM,
2016), 165–68.

52 Bilge Mutlu and Jodi Forlizzi, “Robots

in Organizations: The Role of Workflow,
Social, and Environmental Factors in
Human-Robot Interaction,” in Human-
Robot Interaction (HRI), 2008 3rd
ACM/IEEE International Conference On
Human–Robot Interaction (Nueva York:
ACM, 2008), 287–94.

53 Kleimann Communication Group,

Know Before You Owe: Evolution of
the Integrated TILA–RESPA Disclosures
(Rockville, Maryland: Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau, 2012); Pedro Giovanni
Leon-Najera, “Privacy Notice and
Choice in Practice," (PhD diss., Carnegie
Mellon University, 2014); Stefania
Passera, “Enhancing Contract Usability
and User Experience Through Visual-
ización: An Experimental Evaluation,"
16th International Conference on
Information Visualization (Washington,
corriente continua: IEEE Computer Society, 2012);
Aleecia M. McDonald et al., “A
Comparative Study of Online Privacy
Policies and Formats,” in International
Symposium on Privacy Enhancing
Technologies Symposium, eds. Ian
Goldberg and Mikhail J. Athallah
(Berlina: Saltador, 2009): 37–55; Omri

an ability to act.50 Researchers studying technology use among
vulnerable populations, like the homeless and refugees, have also
developed methods to evaluate dignity-related outcomes when
testing new interventions.51

In addition to quantitative feedback surveys, more qualita-
tivo, interactivo, and generative open-ended design testing sessions can
let design teams gather stakeholders’ reactions, observe their inter-
actions with the prototype, and elicit new re-designs from them.
The testing sessions become more like a workshop, en el cual
respondents can sketch changes, interpret the prototype to work in
the ideal way for them, and improvise how they would use the
thing in practice. Open-ended testing sessions are less about get-
ting a definitive evaluation of a project’s value, and more about
leading to a next version of the prototype, with a gradual refine-
ment of the hypotheses and details of the intervention. These ses-
sions also can take place in context—where the design team places
the prototype in the field to observe whether people notice it,
engage with it, know how to use it, and to see how they interact
with it.52

Lab testing of more discrete new interventions—such as
new legal documents, tecnologías, or visuals—also can be use-
ful to rank different versions of a new prototype and to refine
a vision of the details and composition that must engage and
inform stakeholders. Especially with legal design work, dónde
many interventions involve making complex and intimidating
things more approachable and actionable, lab tests can help design
teams identify what patterns, interactions, and communication
techniques are most promising. Lab evaluations simulate how
a person might encounter a new legal communication or pro-
duct; have the person try to use this prototype; and then have
them recount their experience, rank the prototype on a number
of predefined factors, and propose iterations to refine it.53 If the
legal design work is a new visual communication, then standard
instruments can be used to empirically measure the prototype
in terms of its ability to “perform” for users. Measurements can
include speed of comprehension, accuracy of comprehension, y
positive user experience.54

If the prototype is more of a civic technology or service, alguno
outcome measurements from an early field run might also include
the number of people who engage with the technology, those who
return to it, and those who recommend it to others.55 Other possible
measurements in the short term—to show the performance of the
technology—include the number of bugs, breakdowns, or levels of
attrition.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

More work needs to be done in the legal design community
to produce a standard set of metrics around early-stage legal
design prototypes. The instruments used to assess the different
visual, technological, servicio, organizational, spatial, or policy
designs might differ, depending on these different forms. Still, a
consistent set of factors could be prioritized. A draft of these legal
design testing metrics might include the following features:

1. Usability: Does the thing improve people’s ability to use
the legal system, and their sense of a positive experience

while doing so?
2. Procedural justice: Does it enhance users’ sense of
procedural justice—that the legal system is fair,

transparent, and “for them”?

3. Compromiso: Does the thing affect people’s willingness
to engage with legal tasks—to use the legal system to
resolve problems and to do the tasks within the system?
4. Legal capability: Does the thing improve people’s ability
to efficiently, sufficiently understand the complex legal
information needed to deal with the system? Does the
thing help them to figure out how the law applies to
their specific situation, and enable them to make an
informed, actionable decision?

5. Resolution: Does the thing help people to resolve a prob-
lem, to protect their interests, and to achieve a positive

outcome for themselves (and those around them)?
6. Administrative burden: Does the thing significantly
reduce the amount of time and money that people
must spend to complete the tasks in the legal procedure
and get to a resolution?

Building a Stronger Methodology for a Full Cycle
of Legal Design
The methodology of legal design can draw from a variety of social
ciencia, diseño, and computer science fields to create new strate-
gies for reform, as well as to measure and evaluate new interven-
tions before scaling them and advocating for widespread policy
cambiar. These literatures include HCI, research through design,
applied ethnography, juicio penal, open innovation, y
agile governance.

The pieces that follow in this volume give more examples of
how legal design is being made into a coherent discipline, y cómo
it is being brought into the reform of court systems, data protection
policy-making, community justice, housing rights, and beyond. Como

Ben-Shahar and Adam Chilton,
“Simplification of Privacy Disclosures:
An Experimental Test,” The Journal of
Legal Studies 45, No. 2 (2016): S41–67.

54 Stefania Passera, “Flowcharts,

Swimlanes, and Timelines: Alterna-
tives to Prose in Communicating Legal–
Bureaucratic Instructions to Civil Ser-
vants,” Journal of Business and Technical
Comunicación 32, No. 2 (2018): 229–72.

55 Knight Foundation, “Assessing Civic
Tech: Case Studies and Resources for
Tracking Outcomes,” March 2015, en
www.networkimpact.org.

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020

further work is done to bring a design approach into the various
areas of law, communities need a sustained effort to refine meth-
ods for later in the cycle, as well as to better evaluate and supple-
ment the methods listed here.

Past the exploratory part of the design work, when proto-
types harden into pilots, more work is needed to identify methods
that can take the creative, experimental design approach into the
stricter, more controlled field trials. A crucial missing part of many
legal design efforts currently is the pre-trial and pre-pilot field test-
En g. In this phase of going from lab tests to field tests, there is a
need for “soft trial” tests which involve actual human behavior, pero
which do not lock the solution into a final version. After this field
run, then traditional social science evaluations using observational
trials and randomized controlled trials can be used to determine
how the interventions perform. As empirical legal studies as a field
grows, and as more trials occur in the legal system, legal design
can become integrated in this work and better create and vet new
interventions to be piloted. Legal design thus can generate knowl-
edge about what things can best improve people’s outcomes and
experiences in the legal system.56

Legal design also can become integrated into the field of
behavioral science. As behavioral labs experiment with nudges
and heuristics to see how small interventions can drive better,
evidence-based policymaking, legal design can borrow their meth-
ods and integrate them into their exploratory design work, también
as their lab and field evaluations.57 When legal design focuses on
getting to widespread influence, then literature on innovation
difusión, borrowed from management science and health care,
can provide methodologies for understanding both strategies and
evaluations for scaling and replicating new interventions.58

In future research, legal design practitioners and research-
ers must also define what long term indicators of their work’s
impact might be, and use participatory processes to do so. Alguno
indicators could be around people’s quality of life after having a
legal problem, including their poverty levels, community health,
levels of violence, faith in the government, mental health, stability
of housing, payment of taxes, children’s attendance of schools, eco-
nomic productivity, and willingness to use the courts and other
legal services. Greater methodological work on long-term justice
outcomes can help tie legal design work into policy-making and
anti-poverty efforts beyond the justice system that can demonstrate
a wider purpose of legal innovation for society.

56 D. James Greiner and Andrea Matthews,
“Randomized Control Trials in the United
States Legal Profession,” Annual Review
of Law and Social Science 12, No. 1
(Febrero 2, 2016): 295–312.
57 Richard H. Thaler and Will Tucker,

“Smarter Information, Smarter Con-
sumers,” Harvard Business Review 91,
No. 1 (2013): 44–54; and Alexandra
Fiorillo et al., Applying Behavioral Eco-
nomics to Improve Microsavings Out-
comes (Cambridge, MAMÁ: ideas42, 2014).
58 James W. Dearing and Jeffrey G. Cox,
“Diffusion of Innovations Theory, Princi-
ples, and Practice,” Health Affairs 37,
No. 2 (Febrero 5, 2018): 183–90; y
Karsh, “Beyond Usability.”

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Problemas de diseño: Volumen 36, Número 3 Verano 2020
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