Legal Design Thinking and Legal Visualization. Towards an Understandable EU Law

To build a trust-based relationship between citizens and institutions at both the national and EU level, it is crucial to provide comprehensive information about their policies, decision-making procedures, legislation, and operations, while simultaneously informing citizens about their rights. Likewise, it is essential that both national and EU legal systems be accessible to citizens and, therefore, that they understand their rights and guarantees. All of this requires a paradigm shift in legal studies.

New trends advocate for the visualization of legal information and propose innovative formats for presenting legislation, incorporating design principles and methods to improve public access to the law.

Therefore, the Jean Monnet project "Legal Design Thinking and Legal Visualization: Towards Understandable EU Law" from the CEU UCH Faculty of Law, Business, and Political Sciences is dedicated to training and working in the "Design Thinking" methodology applied to the legal field.

In a context where legal information is increasingly complex, this innovative project focuses on implementing new visualization and presentation trends of legal information. By adopting innovative formats and incorporating design principles and methods, it seeks to significantly improve public access to the law, thus facilitating a better relationship between policies, legal objectives, and citizens. The key is clear, regular, open, and timely communication that meets the society's information needs, thereby improving the inclusive approach to law.

The core of the project is "Legal Design Thinking," whose main objective is to simplify legal information for the public. This is achieved by designing communication techniques and visualizations that transform the way legal systems, EU institutions, their structure, and relevant legal issues are presented, making them more accessible in everyday contexts. The collaboration between communication and information designers is essential for organizing and presenting information in a way that maximizes clarity and understanding.

This approach prioritizes the needs of users and the specific context in which they seek and apply information. It seeks a balance between offering a general and detailed view of the topics, allowing users to seamlessly transition between these perspectives.

The main goal of the project is to introduce this change by encouraging jurists to collaborate with other disciplines, designing mechanisms to communicate complex information that facilitates both the understanding of the law and decision-making.

Visualization is crucial in this process. It includes the incorporation of graphics, icons, tables, diagrams, and images to complement the textual content. This strategy plays a vital role in navigating through the text, clarifying its meaning, and reinforcing its message, even in the realm of law. Visualization not only helps to better understand the content but also makes it more accessible and attractive.

It is essential to recognize that information design goes beyond simple visualization. It includes elements such as language, readability, typography, layout, color coding, and the strategic use of white space. All these aspects are crucial to ensure that legal information is not only comprehensible but also appealing and accessible to a diverse audience.

This project seeks to deepen and consolidate this methodology with the goal of making UCH a benchmark in the field. To this end, it proposes the creation of a "Legal Design Lab" that actively involves professors and students from various campuses, promoting a citizen-oriented approach that overcomes linguistic, educational, and cultural barriers.

In conclusion, through this project, we aspire to apply "legal design thinking" along with advanced visualization techniques to improve the understanding and accessibility of the Law and EU Law. This innovative approach not only enriches legal education but also promotes greater understanding and citizen participation in the legal sphere.

The "Innovation" project aims to explore new approaches and methodologies to make legal topics in general more appealing and adaptable to various target populations. The goal is to shift from a paradigm of "reading the law" to "seeing, hearing, and interacting with the law." Using visual design to communicate complex legal information aims to achieve a "design for understanding" and a "design for decision-making," facilitating citizen engagement with laws and institutions.

Additionally, presenting citizens' rights and guarantees based on the "legal design thinking methodology" and "ergonomic software guidelines" not only improves understanding for all citizens but also ensures accessibility for people with disabilities.

The main objective of this project is to apply the concept of "legal design thinking" along with advanced legal visualization techniques to improve the understanding and accessibility of the Law and EU Law, as well as the functioning of its Institutions. Special emphasis is placed on developing a more citizen-oriented approach, overcoming linguistic, educational, and cultural barriers.

This project is presented as strategic, and its continuation is crucial to consolidate itself as a fundamental tool in the available catalog to achieve the competencies established in the teaching guides of related subjects. At the same time, we aspire to advance in the acquisition of other competencies demanded by the current market. Through creativity, design, and visualization, the project will allow students to develop competencies that will enable them to find innovative solutions applicable in any professional field of law.

To achieve our objectives, our proposal encompasses various activities aimed at strengthening the research:

1. Kick-off Meeting: An initial meeting involving the principal investigators from different areas to set the foundation for the project.
2. Multidisciplinary Meeting: This gathering involves both common and parallel sessions where principal researchers from different areas collaborate with Expert Working Teams (EWT).
3. International Workshop: This event aims to bring together young scientists and leading scholars from diverse research fields to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange.
4. Interviews and Surveys: Conducting targeted interviews and surveys with selected stakeholders to identify specific needs and validate research outcomes.
5. Workshop Seminar: Researchers from each Expert Working Team will present their results, engage in discussions with peers, professionals, and institutional representatives. Following this phase, researchers can update their work and prepare for publication.
6. Applied Innovation Projects with University Students.
7. Creation of Legal Design Thinking Deliverables: This involves producing publications such as working papers and a book detailing scientific methods, techniques, and proven best practices. Additionally, reports summarizing findings will be generated. Dissemination of research results will be facilitated through Legal Design Thinking tools like infographics, tutorial videos, and educational materials.
8. Public Awareness Meetings (PAMs): These sessions are designed to share research results with institutions and private organizations.
9. International Conference: The culmination of the project involves presenting research findings to civil society, academics, politicians, and European Institutions through an international conference.