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About the Book

This book brings together diverse perspectives from researchers working in the fields of law, justice, and design to interrogate the emergence of vocabularies and methods of legal design and unpack their epistemic consequences.

Legal design has emerged in the last decade as an interdisciplinary practice, at the intersection of law and justice, and initially human-centred design. Despite the short history of legal design as a discipline, its foundations in human-centred design have been questioned. Justifying all sorts of innovation for the universal needs of users is even more problematic for human-centred design due to its large adoption in industry and the public sector. Placing a market type of human-consumer at the centre of the legal design activity justifies the reproduction of capitalist and oppressive systems by placing the inspiration for new products and services on the human-user-consumer. The adoption of such practices in policy and legal design can be seen as a tool to impose the market values over democracy, justice, and equality.

This book offers a wide array of alternatives and reference points for making sense of legal design. It critically addresses issues of epistemic injustice in the designing of legal services and systems, bringing together the tradition of socio-legal studies in dialogue with new concepts and frameworks from critical design approaches.

TO ORDER

Introduction -From Legal Design to Legal Designing: Opening Up the Field of Possibilities, Joaquín Santuber & Siddharth Peter de Souza (Johannes Kepler University, Austria & Warwick University, UK)

This chapter situates the collected volume in an ongoing effort to articulate the emergent practices of legal designing, in a way that critically engages with the social and political predilections of the field and its epistemic consequences. Instead of a focus only on theory, the chapter argues that an emphasis on practices of legal design can open up the field of possibilities for different ways of being and knowing. In doing so, we argue that such a focus can highlight the convergences and frictions around vocabulary, methods, networks, and expertise of legal design, and provide understanding of what kinds of architectures sustain the community of legal designers. To make room for the plurality of practice, it is important to have an approach to it. In this introductory chapter, we characterise a shift from thinking of legal design to legal designing, where legal designing practices can be understood as relational, sociomaterial, situated, partial, open, messy, and fluid. We hope that this approach to legal designing will inspire the reader to engage actively with renewed commitments to addressing the epistemic consequences of designing for the law and justice. At the core, these renewed commitments are a collaborative effort to actively seek a community that opens up the field of possibilities for legal designing responsibly – social and political. We hope the book is a collective testimony in that direction.

1. Speculation in Legal Design? Ontological Concerns and Critical Alternatives, Michael Doherty (Lancaster University, UK)

Speculation in legal design is having its first ‘moment’, with a number of legal designers arguing for the adoption of speculative approaches. Speculative critical design (SCD) is often presented as a counterpoint to ‘affirmative design’, a comparison that often seeks to contrast how speculative design is seen as more innovative, creative, free-spirited, progressive, and ambitious than its timid cousin. Speculative design seeks to boldly imagine new worlds that support and liberate ordinary citizens. Affirmative design, in this account, merely aims at making the pain of the status quo less acute or the inequitable society more efficient without undoing its inequity. The inequitable state of law as a social system is readily apparent, so this distinction in design concepts is felt particularly sharply in our domain.

2. Broadening the Scope of Legal Design, Jules Rochielle Sievart (Northeastern University, USA)

This chapter advocates for a transformative, transdisciplinary, and practice-based approach to legal design that reimagines how people interact with and access the law to meet their needs better. Traditional legal design has prioritised efficiency and proceduralism over inclusivity, accessibility, and the lived experiences of communities that have experienced marginalisation. In response, this chapter critiques these limitations and proposes a new methodology that integrates design research, the social sciences, and community-driven practices to broaden the ways legal knowledge is produced, shared, and mobilised. Rather than treating law as a fixed system of rules, this approach frames it as a continuously evolving process shaped by those who engage with it. Grounded in critical legal empowerment, it emphasises that legal knowledge should not remain confined to elite institutions but should be co-produced and made accessible to those directly impacted by legal processes. Through a practice-based design methodology, this chapter demonstrates how legal systems can be actively reshaped, challenging existing power structures and repositioning legal design as a participatory, co-creative process. By embracing legal design as a dynamic and inclusive practice, this approach makes law more adaptable, equitable, and responsive to changing social conditions.

3. Bridging Paradigms: Comparing the Elements of Human-Centric Design in Legal Design and People-Centered Justice Frameworks, Ebru Metin (Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), Nina Toivonen (University of Helsinki, Finland) and Jaana Kovalainen (University of Lapland, Finland)

Legal design can be defined as an approach to law that builds on the theories and methods of human-centred design (HCD). However, HCD has recently come under widespread criticism due to its overly individualistic focus on mere humans instead of humanity as a whole. The re-evaluation of HCD has also emerged in the context of designing for law and justice, such as in arguments for the holistic people-centred justice (PCJ) approach. This paper explores the role of HCD in the conceptualisation and implementation of the PCJ and legal design frameworks. The conclusion is that HCD principles play a key role in both frameworks to transform systems of law and justice. The aim of this paper is to build a bridge between the two streams of thought, PCJ and legal design, and thus develop the movement of putting people and true justice transformation at the centre of legal innovation.

4. Legal Design with Silent Agents: Biomimicry as a Strategy to Understand the Rationales of More-than-Human in Legal Design, Nina Toivonen (University of Helsinki Finland)

The growing recognition of animals, plants, ecosystems, and other more-than-human beings as ontological agents in human society calls for methods that integrate their ways of knowing and being into our designs. This epistemic and methodological challenge also concerns the law. The challenge in designing post-human legalities lies in addressing the complexity and inherent human-centredness of both the law and the socio-material entities regulated by it, such as technology. This article explores biomimicry as a design philosophy and a potential strategy for legal design with the more-than-human. It introduces biomimicry as a design approach and discusses its promises, tensions, and applicability in socio-legal contexts. In addition, the article highlights two natural phenomena, resonance and harmony, which have been used as biological analogies to understand social systems and could also inspire the design of more-than-human-centred law.

5. Does The Legal Design Lexicon Need to be Designed? A Theoretical and Critical Study, Dorra Harrar (Legal.D, Tunisia)

Legal design is a polysemic term poised at the interdisciplinarity of design and law. This interdisciplinarity gives rise to new working methodologies in the field of law and a new way of thinking for legal professionals, as well as new legal deliverables, all expressed through a new vocabulary based on design disciplines such as graphic design, service design and terms such as user, experience, persona, empathy, creativity, ideation, iteration, etc. This paper first offers a theoretical analysis to identify the emergence of a new lexicon related to legal design, a critical analysis of this lexicon’s rigor and the boundaries of its use. Second, the paper evaluates the experience of legal practitioners with this lexicon and assesses whether the legal design lexicon itself needs to be refined. Finally, the paper explores the questions surrounding obstacles to the dissemination of legal design in African and Arabian regions.

6. The Transformative Role of the Public Sector in the Evolving Practice of Legal Design, Kanan Dhru (The Hague University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands)

Design interventions have been proliferating across different aspects of the legal industry over the past several years. While legal design initiatives hold the promise to bring an impact in the way law is understood and practiced, the speed and scale with which the adoption occurs leave things to be desired. This paper commences by touching upon the complexities inherent in the law that necessitate the adoption of human-centred approaches, which it argues, are not entirely new to the world of law, considering its origins. It then explores the reasons why legal design interventions require scaling and subsequently delves into the role of the public sector in facilitating the expansion of legal design. Through the use of the case study of implementing legal design by the Election Commission of India, a government entity, in partnership with Lawtoons, a startup, it showcases how meaningful collaboration between the public and the private sectors can unleash the promise that legal design holds. It advocates for an approach that brings together multiple stakeholders in ultimately achieving better access to legal information.

7. Weaving an Emergent Future from an Engineering Design Perspective: Law, Science, Engineering, and Indigeneity, Ade Mabogunje (Stanford University, USA)

The dynamic nature of society demands a more dynamic lawmaking process, one designed to better help us navigate an unknown future. Here, we present a methodology called ‘weaving’ that could make lawmaking both more inclusive and more agile. Weaving entails (1) crowdsourcing and integrating diverse perspectives to generate creative solutions (eg, policies and laws) and (2) rapidly prototyping those solutions using technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. This methodology requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining the field of law with behavioural science, data science, and engineering. Although it is a radical departure from the law we know today, we believe incorporating weaving into legal education and practice might enable us to become more proactive as our social and physical environments evolve at ever-faster rates. That is, we envision a field of law that leads in innovation and is at the forefront of collective thought and imagination.

8. Designing against 'Self-Abandonment': A US Law Student's Reflections on Legal Design, Elena Kuran (Northeastern University, USA)

This chapter considers how design could disrupt and transform the traditional means and ends of law school in the United States, transforming it into a site of training for those committed to using law for social and political change. It identifies the ways in which law schools produce foot soldiers of the status quo, offering reflections on the toll that such a project has on students of marginalised and minoritised identities in particular. It is informed by personal experience as a current law student, as well as critical legal studies, critical race theory, and critical design studies. By offering designerly interventions in response to critiques of US legal education, it prompts reflection on studying legal design critically.

9. Grounds-up View of Design: Making Meaning of Design in India Through Rooted Legal Design Interventions, Bhawna Parmar (Barabar Design, India)

Design as a discipline has been making inroads into various disciplines in India, positioned as a novel, creative tool to solve society’s complex problems. As the application of design thinking and human-centred design into different domains gains traction, its uncritical adoption demands reflection. Design was formalised in the West with roots in capitalism, but design as a process has existed with humans since time immemorial. Imposing Western design methods into diverse global contexts threatens to overshadow and eliminate the already existing rich design interventions that have been present in the subcontinent. Through an in-depth case study of organisations that have been practicing ‘legal design’ for years, but do not necessarily use or understand the Western vocabularies of design, this article argues to learn from these design approaches in building a decolonial design theory which is provincialised rather than universal. Design approaches that are developed within the subcontinent and account for local social and historical realities provide insights into designing for justice with sustained outcomes. The article emphasises the importance of moving beyond conventional design thinking approaches towards more democratic, community-centred methodologies that acknowledge historical injustices and empower marginalised communities. This research contributes to decolonial design theory by highlighting how legal design in India can learn from existing grassroots practices rather than uncritically transplanting Western design frameworks.

10. Activating Imagination to Promote Epistemic Justice: Speculations on an Island-Wide Citizens' Assembly for Cyprus, Amanda Perry-Kessaris (Kent University, UK)

This chapter considers how designerly ways might contribute to securing epistemic justice in a particular, speculative, ‘proto-legal’ context: an island-wide citizens’ assembly for Cyprus. It identifies two types of imagination (empathetic and systemic) that are crucial to the securing of epistemic justice in a citizens’ assembly. It then draws on the example of the River Roding Interspecies Council, an experiment run by Moral Imaginations on behalf of the government of the United Kingdom, to suggest how designerly ways might prompt and facilitate both forms of imagination in an island-wide citizens’ assembly for Cyprus.

11. Legal Design as Movement Lawyering Methodology: Lessons Learned at the New Jersey Legal Design Lab, Abdul Rehman Khan and Hallie Jay Pope (Seton Hall University School of Law, USA)

This chapter explores liberatory legal design as a methodological approach to movement lawyering, drawing on lessons from the New Jersey Legal Design Lab at Seton Hall Law School. Situated within a broader housing justice initiative, the Lab collaborates with tenants, organisers, and legal practitioners to co-create legal tools, civic infrastructure, and participatory models of decision-making that centre community wisdom. Grounded in traditions of radical pedagogy and Scandinavian participatory design, the chapter argues that legal design – when informed by movement lawyering principles – can shift power to communities historically excluded from legal and political systems. The first part of the chapter critiques dominant paradigms of democracy, legal institutions, and participatory design. It argues for a move beyond ‘access to justice’ frameworks towards deeper, community-led transformation. The second part draws practical and theoretical insights from historical movements, including the Highlander Folk School and early workplace democracy projects, and articulates four lessons from these traditions: the importance of blurring boundaries between classroom and community; reclaiming individual and collective agency; embedding explicit political values in design work; and cultivating joy and radical imagination. Through these lessons, the chapter offers liberatory legal design as both a critique of and an intervention in dominant socio-legal structures. It positions legal design not as a neutral tool, but as a method capable of advancing self-determination, democratising legal knowledge, and enabling collective transformation. By weaving legal education, participatory research, and movement strategy, this chapter offers a vision for how law schools might reimagine their role in supporting community power and structural change.

12. Justice Beyond the User-Experience: Designing for the Sublime in Courts, Pablo Hermansen (School of Design, Pontificia Universidad de Chile, Chile) and Joaquín Santuber (Johannes Kepler University, Austria)

In a solution-driven society, designing in the field of justice and the courts invites us to reconsider our practices beyond the user experience and to articulate the material conditions for the emergence of the sublime. Inspired by the rituality in courts and the more-than-human agency of Justice, we are refiguring an alternative approach, an alternative way of dealing with the pressing issues of a highly techno-digitally mediated, late capitalist society. We call this approach Designing for the Sublime. Building on rituals, transcendence, and the sublime, we seek a way out of the individual ontology of dominant transactional narratives in justice and design, and project ways in which we can support the emergence of the common, a being together. While the emphasis in design has been on the user/individual experience, we argue that there is no such thing as an individual experience, as all experience is collective. In this sense, Design for the Sublime seeks through rituals for ways in which the transcendent (what is beyond the immediacy of the human individual) has a greater agency in justice systems. Because rituals, transcendence, and the sublime are neglected by the scientific epistemologies, Design for the Sublime solicits our practices to embrace alternative ways of knowing, ways of producing, storing, and exchanging knowledge, as a fundamental disposition to entangle with other knowing bodies – human and more-than-human. Exploring the role of sound across contexts, the physical and online courtroom, we ground our theoretical elaborations on two cases where more-than-human rituality and transcendence comprise and give meaning to the immediate: the winning installation at the London Design Biennale 2021 ‘Tectonic Resonances’ and a Michiluwün, a Mapuche ritual in the Wellmapu (south of Chile). With the aim of speculating on how a process of Design for the Sublime could begin, we prototyped scenarios by transposing the sound of a Mapuche ritual and a lithoponic art installation into the courtroom, prototyping understood as a cosmopolitical action. Our contribution challenges the monopolistic hegemony of dominant practices of design at three levels: the ontological (beyond the human individual), the epistemological (beyond the scientific knowing), and methodological (beyond the problem-solving design).

13. Beyond the Problem-Solution Paradigm in Legal Design: Making the Cloud Rain in Bahrain, Bader Alnoaimi (IISJ, Onati, Spain)

A technology does not become a ‘technology’ until someone articulates a normative-epistemic framework for defining what it is, how it should be used, and who should benefit from it. Policymakers have to promote emerging technologies – such as cloud computing – as solutions for improving efficiency, and for transforming operations and services for the benefit of the whole of society, to encourage their adoption. Yet, this techno-solutionism closes the door on debates about the issues that society faces or the values that people want to be governed by. Legal design has been proposed as a way to introduce democratic practices into public policies. But legal design can fall short of achieving these lofty goals when legal design as a field, and legal designers as practitioners, fail to recognise the assumptions embedded within legal design itself, and the subjectivity of the legal designer. Legal design is too focused on ‘problem-finding’ and ‘problem-solving’, and fails to recognise that legal design is a practice of problem-constructing. Using the case study of Bahrain’s ‘Cloud First Policy’ – which seeks to promote the institutional adoption of cloud computing technologies to reduce costs and increase productivity, this paper problematises the solutionist rationales in technology policy and legal design, which shut down opportunities to ask why this technology and for whom. Instead, the paper calls for a critical legal design practice that should focus on facilitating debates over the values upon which society should be governed. Does society want to be competitive or efficient or innovative or something else?

14. Can Making a Law be Playful? A Case for Designing for Democratic Deliberation in India, Siddharth Peter de Souza, Varsha Aithala, Siddhi Gupta and Saumya Varma (Justice Adda, India)

In this paper, we explore the potential of legal design as an imaginative and playful approach to developing, understanding, and disseminating law. Through a case study that discusses the development of a board game project titled ‘Sabha’, which is the outcome of a multi-year project by Justice Adda, a law and design social venture in India, developed in partnership with the Hanns Seidel Stiftung, the paper explores what design can do to build meaningful deliberation in democratic societies. ‘Sabha’ is designed as a print-and-play interactive multiplayer board game. It seeks to immerse players in the ‘world’ of the Indian Parliament, and to inform and educate players about Parliamentary procedures, the roles and responsibilities of parliamentary representatives, and the process of law-making. The paper contextualises the need for ‘Sabha’ within the evolution of the Indian parliament and its relationship with the people it represents. By discussing concepts of ‘playful’ pedagogy in the development of the game, the paper explains the value of using legal design in this process of game design. It argues that such an approach is valuable not only to think beyond the typical form of the law, but also to be free of the typical spaces of the law.

Table of Contents

What Design and Law have in common?