Prepared for Critical Approaches to Participation in Legal Design, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick and BC Access to Justice Centre for Excellence, University of Victoria. Organised by Aaron Leakey, Siddharth de Souza, and Lorna Cameron. Hybrid via Warwick University on 02.11.26.
I tend to think in terms of ‘designerly ways with law’ (following Nigel Cross), or of ‘working in design mode’ (following Ezio Manzini), rather than Legal Design. I prefer these terms because I think they are more precise about what kinds of intersections between law and design I am referring to; and accommodating of the wide range of things that design can do for law, and how.
For me, working in designerly ways with law involves adopting a simultaneously practical-critical-imaginative mindset, following iterative experimental processes; using visual and material (as well as oral and textual) means to communicate with ourselves, and with others; and attending to the needs and wants of those who might use, or be otherwise affected by, what we are designing.
What role does participation play in legal design in theory?
In theory, designerly ways can prompt and facilitate (what I call) ‘structure-yet-free’ ecosystems. These ecosystems are well-suited to lawyerly thinking and practice, because it is similarly structured-yet-free. More importantly for the purposes of this event, these ecosystems can nurture, among other things, collaboration and inclusion and, therefore, participation.
I emphasise ‘can’ because there is nothing inherently participatory about design.
What about in practice?
What roles has participation played in (my) practice
All of the design-driven projects that I have undertaken have been aimed, at least in part, at enhancing or widening participation, whether in legal research, education, or activism.
I will very briefly introduce some of those projects, highlighting by whom, in what process, for what purpose, and where, the participation to place. All involved hands-on, learning-by-doing, workshops; usually in significant locations. Some involved additional asynchronous activities. Further detail, including the names of those who co-led and participated in the projects, can be found via the links.
- Hate crime across Europe and in India: activists, policy-makers, public authorities; knowledge generation, knowledge exchange, and capacity-building around reporting and prevention of targeted violence; across seven cities in Europe, or online due to Covid.
- Fantasy Legal Exhibitions: legal academics; capacity-building around exhibition as legal research method; in multiple curated sites, plus a playground.
- Mini interspecies council: activists; knowledge generation and exchange, capacity building, process testing around the potential of an interspecies council to support empathetic and systemic imagination in preparation for a future citizens assembly on the future of the Cyprus peace process; in the UN Buffer Zone.
- Enlivening legal education through The Postal Museum (academics, archivist, secondary school students and educators; capacity-building and process testing around how curated collections can be used to enhance university legal education, and the ability of secondary school students to develop and evidence their legal capability; at The Postal Museum, in a secondary school and on-line.
What role did design play in enhancing/widening participation across these projects?
Event design practitioners know that participation has (at least) three stages: before, during, after.
My initial sense is that designerly ways had the following effects on participation in the projects I have mentioned above:
- Before: they made attendance both more and less likely, depending on the orientation of the potential participant—some run away at the mention of design or the idea of doing something radically different, others run towards. Participation can be encouraged by a carefully designed call, which requires as little as possible of the applicant(s) and seeks to include even those participants that we are not able to anticipate. This is something that is (with more and less success) often addressed in ethics approval processes
- During: they enhanced the quality of participation by improving communication and inclusion among the immediate participants, thereby making their participation more meaningful. This requires seeking and valuing the exercise of agency by participants.
- After: they made longer-term, wider-ranging, unanticipated (indirect) participation more possible and probable, especially by supporting the generating, testing, and dissemination of user-centred resources.
Conclusion
My answer to the question posed by the organisers–‘What role does participation play in legal design?’—is that participation can be generated, facilitated, prevented, perverted, or left untouched.
I also think it is worth emphasising that there is nothing inherently ‘good’ or ‘useful’ about participation. Participating in someone else’s project can be tiring, tedious, pointless, downright damaging (but it can also help you to see things differently, feel a sense of community, achieve more than you could alone). It all depends on having responsible and responsive project leaders and participants, and an appropriate research design (whether or not it deploys designerly ways).
Nor, of course, is there anything inherently good or useful about law or about design. So let’s try to keep ourselves and each other honest.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Siddharth, Aaron and Lorna for organising this timely and important opportunity for reflection, and to participants (!) for their insightful questions, which have informed this post.
