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Brown and white clocks
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The Temporal Promise of Sociolegal Design

Brown and white clocks
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Over the last decade increasing attention has been paid to the potential of design-based methods to enhance social scientific thinking and practice, both inside the academy and beyond.

Views differ as to what is distinctive about design-based methods and how best to refer to them. As I have explained elsewhere, I use the term ‘designerly ways’, by which I mean an assemblage of mindsets, process and strategies which, albeit not exclusive to are together characteristic of, design-based disciplines such as graphic design, architecture, service design and so on. And I focus on designerly mindsets, which I understand to be simultaneously practical, critical and imaginative; designerly processes, which I understand to emphasise experimentation; and designerly strategies, which I understand to emphasise making ideas visible and/or tangible (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Designerly ways. Image © Amanda Perry-Kessaris 2022. ‘Experimental’ section is adapted from the ‘Double Diamond’, originally developed by the Design Council in 2014.

I am interested in how designerly ways can connect with, reinforce and challenge lawyerly ways across legal practice, policy-making and activism, as well as teaching, and research.

Socio-legal researchers and design researchers with an interest in law have much to learn from each other. Socio-legal specialists understand law as a fundamentally social phenomenon—as existing in, shaping and shaped by social actions, interactions, systems and rationalities. Likewise, designers increasingly promote human-centred methods, and understand design as ‘a sociomaterial practice’—that is, as comprising ‘dynamic configurations of minds, bodies, objects, discourses, knowledge, structures/processes and agency’; and as shaping and shaped by wider social life.

Indeed it makes sense to combine designerly and socio-legal ways to form a distinctive approach to law that I have called ‘sociolegal design’. Those who use information design and service design techniques to improve everything from contracts to virtual courts, ought to think of themselves less as legal designers, more as sociolegal designers. They should look to socio-legal theory both for ways of conceptualising law, and for sociologically-informed hypotheses about questions such as what factors make law more or less effective. And they ought to look to empirical socio-legal research for deep insights into, for example, obstacles to justice; as well as ideas about how to collect new data to capture the empirical legal realities.

At the same time, designerly ways can enhance the conceptual, empirical, normative, processual and relational dimensions of sociolegal research. For example, Guy Julier and Lucy Kimbell have shown the processual and relational power of the designerly way of collaborative prototyping, in which rough models are co-made to represent actual presents and potential futures, can prompt and facilitate social science researchers to work across disciplinary boundaries to produce meaningful research propositions. Joanna Perry and I have shown how a collaborative activity, in which paper and string are used to map how hate crime is and could be reported and recorded, can prompt and facilitate diverse stakeholders to work across distrustful and hierarchical professional boundaries, making socio-legal research more, or differently, impactful; and, together with Mohsin Alam Bhat, we have shown how a simple three column table can generate a structured-yet-free space in  which anti-hate crime activists can collaboratively specify where they are, where they ought to be and how they might get there, and thereby to experiment with the alien concept of hate crime.

But it seems the deepest promise of sociolegal design may be temporal. Designers can create artefacts, spaces, scenarios and worlds (Figure 2). These may be digital, akin to a gaming world; or material, akin to a theatre set. And what they seek to capture might range in from the concrete and/or specific to the abstract and/or general.

Figure 2: Scales of design. Image © Amanda Perry-Kessaris 2022. Adapted from ‘Experiential futures ladder’ by Stuart Candy, 2016.

What is important from a socio-legal design perspective is that by engaging with these designs researchers and research participants can experience what is not yet, or is not still, or will never (for us) be, there. As the examples discussed in the publications and presentations linked to this post show, we can be prompted and facilitated to move incrementally towards the unknown: backwards to surface memories of sociolegal pasts, forwards to consider alternative possible sociolegal futures, and outwards to experience sociolegal presents that are not available to people like us.

How might these new ways of accessing socio-legal pasts, presents and futures contribute to socio-legal research? Time and further research will surely tell.

About the Author

Amanda Perry-Kessaris

Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris

Professor of Law, Kent Law School

Amanda Perry-Kessaris is Professor of Law at Kent Law School. She specialises in empirically grounded, theoretically informed, cross-disciplinary approaches to law; and to the economic lives of law in particular. Her recent publications include Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode (Routledge, 2021), a monograph exploring what design can do for sociolegal research; and Design in Legal Education (Routledge, 2022), a collection co-edited with Emily Allbon, which explores what design can do for legal teachers and learners in higher education, legal practice and beyond.

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