This task was an interesting challenge because there are so many uncertainties that we think about every day, but we often don’t realize about them and let them pass. However, acknowledging and naming them became a very validating, self-reflecting activity. I say that it was validating because it allowed me to actively understand where some of the many concerns and uncertainties have come from.
To start the project, I began with some creativity exercises that helped me activate my brain to tackle those difficult questions. For this, I participated in a “Thinking through Drawing” workshop given by the university. During the workshop, we were invited to not think too much, we just drew as the ideas came, and afterward, we reflected on what we did. The teacher also asked us to think about one project we had to develop, and of course, I chose this one. From this exercise, I could see what my main uncertainties were because they surfaced easily while I was drawing.
Uncertainity #1: Law, legal design, and how it is presented to society.
After working in the human rights NGO, I discovered I was very curious and interested in approaching different ways to understand and create better legal services, specially because I saw people struggling to understand their own rights or anything law-related. That’s when I stumbled upon legal design. To give some context, according to Margaret Hagan, the director of Stanford’s Design Lab, “legal design is the application of human-centered design to the world of law, to make legal systems and services more human-centered, usable, and satisfying.” For me, legal design is about democratizing law, giving people the opportunity to understand their rights and act with knowledge. Law is supposed to be for everyone, but in reality, only some privileged individuals have access to it, mostly people who have the priviledg to study or to affort a lawyer when needed. Following this path, I decided to work in a design consultancy where I collaborated with clients applying legal design and conducting creative workshops using the design thinking methodology to create improved and more empathetic legal services. This was a crucial experience because it taught me basically everything I know about design and design thinking. Nevertheless, I kept wondering if legal design is the only way of improving law? Could there be better ways of interacting with law in a more humanistic approach?
My experience working with design thinking applied to law and legal services was the only thing I talked about. Being in this course has made me reflect on what questions we are not asking yet and how we could formulate better questions. I decided to start reading about design methodologies, and in my exploration, I discovered the book “Re-imagining Design” by Kevin G. Bethune. As I started reading, I found his conversation about how multidisciplinary innovation is the future and how designers should question the reasons they are designing. It resonated with me because, after all, I’m a lawyer doing an MA and sometimes finding the connection between two disciplines so different could be hard. In his book, he briefly mentions a TED talk called “Design Thinking is Bullshit” by Natasha Jen, and as soon as I read about it, I watched it immediately.
Surprisingly, this talk made me question everything I’ve taken for granted in the last couple of years. Natasha points out how design thinking is the watered-down version of what designers do and makes interesting points about how design thinking promises innovation, but innovation is not really a thing; it’s a quality that cannot be instantly delivered as design thinking promises. She criticizes the common bootcamps agencies and universities sell to teach design thinking. I found this very very interesting because I’ve been part of this bootcamps, even so, I’ve been facilitating in different moments this bootcamps! Understanding how design thinking also plays a part in the capitalistic ways of approaching solutions made me view it with different eyes. People want the instant satisfaction of resolving big problems without having a more holistic view of the problem.
This made me reflect on my experiences working at the design consultancy and question if legal design is the only answer to creating better and more humanistic ways of approaching law. It made me question what are the things that I’m still not seeing, and it definitely made me feel uncomfortable about what could be the next step because I really don’t know what could be the answer.
Uncertainity #2. Gender equality and design
Related to legal design, as a feminist, I also became very passionate about understanding how design (and law) has become part of contributing to the reproduction of systemic oppression and made me think about if the entire system has been designed for a default male standard, is gender equality ever possible?
To back my thoughts, I started reading two books: “Invisible Woman” by Caroline Criado Perez and “Design Justice” by Sasha Costanza-Chock.
The first book states with data that most services created and designed have a customer – the default male, and there is no data that represents how women experience those same experiences males are living. The data does not give women a voice to ask for better services because the system is not interested in having this data. Why has the reference man still been a reference for every service created, even in medicine? For this, I also found very interesting watching a video called Everything is designed for this man, even drugs
The book “Design Justice” explores precisely how this cis-normality has given some unwritten rules on how design should be interpreted and how the system is biased against women or any other gender that’s not male. The author also states: “Design Thinking is deployed to reproduce a colonial political economy with design imagined at the top of the value chain as a key process to be managed only by firms from the Global North.” As a lawyer and a design enthusiast I find such a big responability of being aware of this things that were never taught to me. How could we make design better? How could we make law better?
Taking for granted how things have been designed is such a dangerous assumption. I feel uncertain about how could this situacion improve in a more systematic way, but I find in fascinating.
Uncertainity #3. Ignorance is bliss
It generates a lot of uncertainty for me how people, including me, decide to stay ignorant of certain situations to continue living happily. It happened to me when I worked defending victims of police violence. Once I quit, I decided to stop reading the newspapers, listening to the radio, and talking to friends about politics. I decided to be blissfully ignorant. But I know it is not the solution because I’m also aware that being participative in everyday situations and taking an informative stance is also a form of activism. How could we overtake the truth of things that happened and not decide to remain ignorant?
Conclusion
I chose these uncertainties because I want to find answers to my feelings. Maybe I won’t find an answer to everything, but at least I tried, and this course is about that – trying with purpose.
Thanks for reading.