Keywords

1 Definition of Legal Design (LD) and Visual Law (VL)

Before describing the process of the comic book co-creation, an overview of the concepts of LD and VL will be provided. Both concepts are relatively unknown, even amongst legal scholars. LD was created through an initiative at the Stanford Law School that brought together three areas of design, technology, and law to simplify legal language. As defined by Margaret Hagan, creator of the concept and author of the book Law by Design (2021), this instrument is “the way we evaluate and design legal business in a simple, functional, attractive and usable way.”Footnote 1 LD, borrowing from the domain of design thinking,Footnote 2 is centred on people and their needs. It shifts the focus from the professional viewpoint—mainly of lawyers and judges—to the recipients of the legal document. These recipients can include common citizens, private and public individuals, organizations, and communities. The aim is to create effective solutions following feedback obtained from ongoing interactions with the final recipients. Such feedback is continuously mapped and collected from the inception of the project until the implementation phase. In other words, in working with LD, the legal world can empathetically examine how to meet the needs of the recipients and legal entities through a process of hands-on communication and active listening.

While LD focuses on helping the legal community develop effective communication for the benefit of the beneficiaries and creating the foundations for creative legal reasoning, VL is the visual manifestation of this conceptual thinking. This distinction can be visualised with an iceberg,Footnote 3 wherein LD represents the hidden bottom, and VL represents the exposed top, which can be observed and experienced by all. Essentially, VL is the external manifestation of LD and serves to put into practice a non-conventional format that makes legal documents more explanatory. VL can be developed through features that include—but are not limited to—images, illustrations, videos, infographics, graphics, timelines, QR codes, flowcharts, bullet points, pictograms, comics, storytelling, maps, story mapping, links, music, gamification, and podcasts.

While LD and VL have their origins within law firms as tools to help clients understand the legal processes affecting them, they have been progressively adapted to achieve other goals (Hagan, 2018, 2019, 2020). First—which will be further elaborated on in the following sections—LD and VL can be developed as legal education resources to help stimulate the mindsets of future legal scholars, ultimately helping them thoroughly understand community needs. Second, in legal research, the outcomes of LD and VL can be used as practical tools to effectively disseminate and communicate project results. Third, these instruments are innovative strategic tools that can empower society to overcome the challenging and often opaque process of advocating for their rights. Finally, these tools can be applied to support the decolonisation of legal mindsets and law itself (Poto, 2022). This is accomplished by involving research participants who are typically outside the dominant Western legal doctrine of environmental law, while also further developing techniques for knowledge co-creation. Hereinafter, the expressions West, Western-centric and Eurocentric are used interchangeably to denote those epistemologies founded on the coloniality of knowledge (Fonseca, 2019; Quijano, 2000). Coloniality of knowledge is defined as the epistemic violence perpetrated by the settlers at the ‘encounter’ with the ‘other.’ This practice is based on the invisibility, denial, silencing, expropriation, and extraction of non-Western knowledge, and largely remains the dominant rationality of Western value sets (de Sousa Santos, 2010).

Through knowledge co-creation supported by the collaborative use of LD and VL tools, it is possible to contribute to the re-emergence of Indigenous perspectives and cosmovisions,Footnote 4 ultimately weaving these into the scientific method (Saida, 2022). Unfortunately, Indigenous knowledge, value sets, and legal orders are historically considered inferior to the predominance of the ‘universalization of law’ (Colaço & Damázio, 2017), which supports a single and universal way to build legal rights and obligations. Ultimately, the objective of using LD and VL is to facilitate the effective participation of all parties involved in environmental matters. This can be accomplished by making all parties effective co-participants in environmental legal research. This explains the adoption of the expression ‘recipient/participant,’ used hereinafter to define the actors of our LD and VL co-created legal methodology.

An example of the effectiveness of LD and VL as legal tools is highlighted in the experience of the Escazú Agreement (EA) on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, which has been transformed into a comic book (Parola & Poto, 2021a, 2021b). This transformation will be described in greater detail in Chapter III, regarding the project titled, Legal Design and Visual Law in International Environmental Law: Conversion of the Escazú Agreement in Visual Materials for the Chiquitano People. Our primary goal was to facilitate the Chiquitano understanding of environmental rights that are recognized in the EA (CEE/ONU, 1998), in tandem with improving environmental democracy. This is based on the three pillars mentioned in the Introduction: access to information,Footnote 5 participation,Footnote 6 and access to justiceFootnote 7 in environmental matters. At the same time, the project sought to promote the co-creation of new knowledge by actively encouraging the Chiquitano participation.

2 Stages of Legal Design and Visual Law

This section illustrates the steps that put LD into practice by applying the techniques of VL.

2.1 Selection of the Recipient/Participant

As explained above, the first step in LD and VL is to choose the creative project’s target audience. Specifically relating to ECO_CARE methodology, the target audience acts as co-participants in the research journey. This means the innovative term ‘recipient/participant’ refers to the active role that all parties play in the process of co-creation. Being able to define the target audience of the recipients/participants is a fundamental step that ensures accuracy in each step of the research, as well as ensuring the project’s results are tailored to their needs. This way, process and results represent community-specific value sets and contribute to overcoming Western centrism in research and law (Quijano, 2000). Having project results tailored to the needs of the target audience does not affect the reuse of data, as it allows researchers to analyse and publish findings based on the same data. As well, it greatly contributes to the emerging body of literature through the generation of new discussion and publications on the project’s results.

2.2 Study of the Needs of the Recipient/Participant—Empathy

The study of the recipient/participant target audience marks the second stage of this process. This stage comprises an in-depth assessment and subsequent analysis of the targeted community’s characteristics—their demographics—and needs, which includes cultural legacy, legal values, language, educational system, and access to digital technologies. These assessments and analyses are often typical of healthcare studies; however, this process provides significant insights and can serve as an innovative tool for legal scholars and researchers (Di Lallo et al., 2019).

The need for assessment and analysis within the community is fundamental to demarcate the study field. Building a field of study through dialogues and meaningful interactions with participants can help to develop a sense of collective purpose, while also advancing levels of active participation. When the study takes shape as a collective endeavour, this format can ultimately contribute to ingratiating empathy within education and research activities (Berardi, 2020). According to widely cited research, although empathy is an innate quality (Sofronieva, 2012; Hoffmann, 2000),Footnote 8 it can also be developed by practising positive social behaviours.Footnote 9 While using LD and VL, the process of promoting and strengthening empathy can unfold via two steps. First, a unilateral understanding of the needs of the project’s recipients should be established. Second, in tandem with the elaboration of recipients/participants’ needs, the effective involvement of the recipients in the co-creation process must be facilitated and strengthened. In both steps, reflexivity and empathetic thinking are practised and developed by all project participants, be they students, researchers, or community members. Such an approach—while commonplace in healthcare studies and criminal justice (Hoffman, 2000)—is innovative in the field of environmental law research. In our case, the mutual connections and exchange helped grow empathy among the participants by fostering trust, friendship, and compassion.

2.3 Study of the Legal Issue and Choosing the Legal Materials

In the third phase, three questions are posed to all the participants:

  1. (1)

    What is the problem or need that must be solved or addressed?

  2. (2)

    What is the legal problem that the recipient/participant must deal with?

  3. (3)

    Which legal materials can be transformed through LD?

After identifying the legal problem and/or the relevant legal materials, the creation phase can commence, with active facilitation from the recipients/participants.

2.4 Ideation and Options

Two techniques are adopted in this stage: brainstorming and reverse brainstorming. Brainstorming is well-known in the field of design thinking (Thoring & Müller, 2011). As for the first technique, according to the Interaction Design Foundation, “brainstorming is a method design teams use to generate ideas to solve clearly defined design problems. In controlled conditions and a free-thinking environment, teams approach a problem by such means as “How Might We” questions. They produce a vast array of ideas and draw links between them to find potential solutions.”Footnote 10 In this phase, good and bad ideas are not assessed, instead, a discussion of all the ideas is presented and considered by the participants. Following this, any initial ideas are filtered and refined. Every idea is written down on a physical or virtual sticky note. Through this technique, the development of unorthodox and unachievable ideas is encouraged.

The second technique—reverse brainstorming—requires foresight; specifically, mapping out potential risks and challenges that may undermine plans of action (Evans, 2012). The goal is to unlock the participants’ creative thinking, as it is often easier to criticise and identify gaps than to outline a strategy for success. As Hagen et al. (2016) put it,

“Using reverse-brainstorming as an idea generation tool, participants often find that identifying negative elements is easier than identifying positive elements [...] creating an exercise that is cognitively stimulating, interesting, and even somewhat silly [...]. After negative elements are identified, [...] instructors can turn the question into a positive, asking students to use the negative elements to provide a clearer solution to the problem, thereby engaging multiple levels of cognition and increasing creativity and idea generation. [I]nstructors may find that using reverse-brainstorming as a tool will engage students in deeper discussions that challenge them to generate ideas and turn those into workable, classroom- and content-appropriate solutions. Because students may find it easier and more engaging to identify negative elements, classroom collaboration and communication can improve.”Footnote 11

Once the group has finished compiling the list of bad ideas, they are asked to turn these negatives into positive ideas. This is accomplished by looking into the failed suggestions and coming up with methods that achieve the opposite effect. In essence, the group seeks to reverse engineer the negative ideas to find novel solutions.Footnote 12

To conclude this phase, the group selects the best idea based on a set of collaboratively produced implementation criteria. The criteria can include considerations regarding logical consistency and plausibility, generalisability, simplicity, efficiency, effectiveness, and accessibility. As stated above, in the original LD process (Hagan, 2020), the recipients are not included in the final project results. In our approach, since recipients co-participate in every step of the co-creation process—therefore making them recipients/participants—they provide constant feedback and can effectively contribute to the project. Notably, in the case of the ECO_CARE project, an Indigenous representative of the Chiquitano people worked back-to-back with the LD and VL students to assist in selecting the most appropriate and implementable project idea.

2.5 Prototyping

After the selection of a promising idea, the group starts developing the project prototype (Meinel & Leifer, 2012). Prototyping helps the process move forward efficiently. As Olsen (2015) puts it, “prototyping moves the Design Thinking project forward. By building simple models or drawing sketches before knowing the answer, prototyping helps the innovators to think. The goal of rapid prototyping is to make mistakes as fast as possible. By making multiple simple models of unsolved problems, the idea is that surprising discoveries will be encountered.” At this stage, the recipients/participants become active co-creators, contributing to the development of the prototype and, therefore, transforming the process of LD into a tangible VL, as the final product.