Legal Design
The deployment of design principles within a legal context has gained some traction in recent years, with exciting work being done on contract design, policy design and legal education too.
The legal world has woken up to the fact that actually it would be quite helpful if we designed legal documentation so it is understandable by all, not just the lawyers who drafted it. Those who need to use it, should understand it. Viewing law as a service rather than some deluxe product allows us to assess it by different means: focusing in on how usable and accessible they really are and making changes to ensure complexity is reduced or even eradicated.
We have got used to an online world where we sign up for things without thinking, clicking through the dull terms and conditions in order to get at the product. This might not seem that crucial when you’re talking about your mobile phone contract but what about if you don’t know what the law says about something as pivotal as your own sexual and reproductive health rights?
It might seem alien to imagine living in a country where you do not understand your rights, particularly those that relate to your own body, but for Nepali women living in rural communities this is a reality.
Two landmark judgments were made by the Supreme Court of Nepal but outside of constitutional law and activists circles, the impact of this went unnoticed, and many of the population would not know anything of the judgments or why they changed the law for them personally. We wanted to apply design-thinking to this problem and see what was possible in terms of improving the understanding of sexual and reproductive health rights. This wasn’t the full story though; we also needed to change perceptions by those in the legal profession and the medical profession - letting them see the challenges faced by citizens, as well as providing all the relevant law. This was pivotal for those who would encounter individuals within their jobs but also for those who might influence policy and reform in the future.
Our work here needed to be inclusive and participatory – the lived experience would need to inform everything that we created. Over the years of the project, we have run a range of different workshops with diverse groups of participants in Nepal, but they all pivot around empathy and co-creation. In our very first one we spent an afternoon with participants creating personas (sometimes called archetypes) – fictional examples of women facing different challenges to their sexual and reproductive health rights. Six of these personas would form the first part of our toolkit and indeed inform everything that followed.
Other methods have been used in subsequent workshops and in the time that followed the official launch of the toolkit, we have focused on using scenarios alongside the toolkit so that participants can share what would follow for that individual facing SRHR challenges, in their experience. This is allowing us to gain impact data on how the toolkit is used in different contexts and in different professions, but also what challenges remain for people in difficult situations, particularly in relation to their being able to gain access to constitutional sexual and reproductive health rights.