The fifth and last workshop and co-working of the Urban Clinic, held on the Luiss Webex Platform, had as guest Joaquin Santuber and Lina Krawietz, Co-founders of the start-up “This Is Legal Design” based in Berlin.
After introducing themselves, our guests presented us the world of Legal Design, which is, in the words of Joaquin: “a way of improving people’s lives and making their life easier”. In order to be clearer about the meaning of Legal Design, Joaquin divided the word into two concepts. First “Legal”, that is the legal system that regulates our interactions in our society. For example, legal industry businesses that are provided and work with the legal system (courts, legal firms, legal departments, etc..). Second, “design” is more complicated to define. There are many design notions. Very often we are familiar with the idea of product design. For instance, service design, such as the process and steps of using a computer. In our case, it represents a creative problem-solving approach to complex challenges. When “This Is Legal Design” was founded, they needed to find an original approach, new solutions to make people’s lives better and easier improving users experience. Since the legal side touches us in every aspect of our life, they applied this mindset to the legal system and decided to conceptualize their start-up with the purpose of solving problems from the legal world, such as access to justice or helping legal firms to identify with the businesses they work with.
After being updated on the advancement of the LabGov’s project “Ri-Made”, the Legal Design team presented us some case studies of projects they created for some firms in order to illustrate what types of results we are looking for. Then, they showed us that legal aspects are everywhere, especially on the Internet. A good example might be the use of cookies on webpages. it is important to be innovative to pursue our goal, in every aspect and not only the legal ones. “How can we find innovative ways to overcome legal barriers to our sustainable fashion project?” Joaquin explained that once again the solution is something that has to do with the attitude, by looking at things critically. He then introduced the concept of “legal touchpoints” with the example of the “terms and conditions” that we have to accept every time we register on a social network or on a platform. In fact, these privacy policies are created by lawyers, which do not adapt their content to be understandable for everyone. Often, if some legal aspects are too complex to understand, using visual supports like comics or videos can be very helpful. At the end of the workshop, he left us with some questions to reflect on as homework for the following day. How could this look like in our project? How to share an idea with collaborators? How can we communicate safely our business plan?
Let’s get started with Saturday’s co-working! The students were divided into two groups, one kept on working on the Webex Platform, while the second one held his meetings on the Zoom platform.There were four blocks of activities during the day. Each block started with the Legal Design team providing some inputs to guide the two teams in the realization of innovative legal touchpoints for the project, then both teams met for a brief meeting with Joaquin and Lina at the end of each block to have some feedbacks. The goal of the day was to identify the two main Legal Touchpoints of our project and find original and innovative ways to make them more understandable for our audience. The first group focused on finding an original way to present the “terms and conditions” to the user at the moment of the registration, while the second one worked to solve the legal barriers that may occur when a user’s order is damaged and he has to return it back to “Ri-Made”.
After lunch, Joaquin and Lina asked the students and the tutors of the two groups to prepare a short video that could make the solutions that they had found more comprehensible, in order to present their ideas in a creative and visual way.In the final part of the co-working, the students showed the videos that they created. To conclude the fifth co-working the students updated the tutors on how they are handling the making of video tutorials of sustainable activities that they are filming from home. Moreover, on this last day of co-working, the LabGovers and tutors talked about the planning of the final day of the Urban Clinic which will take place on May 5th from 4 pm to 6 pm with the participation of Director General and the Provost. They will have to present their project an audience of experts, so a lot of work is ahead of us to prepare this exciting day!
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