Justice Innovation
I have been scouting out service design inspirations, particularly from airports, that courts could use. This one is from JFK airport, in the Delta terminal. I was very impressed with their service design. They had taken over an entire gate with a help center that had all kinds of touchpoints: paper, phone terminals, people, kiosks. There were multiple entry points and lots of capacity, so that people could self-sort depending on the magnitude of their issue, the speed they needed it resolved, and their comfort with tech.
Of particular interest: the Need Help card. Can we make these for all courts?
A team from Justice Design at Osgoode Law’s Winkler Institute developed a prototype of an app that could prep people for small claims court, and take care of issues directly
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Going to small claims court can be nerve racking, costly and time consuming. #B4 Small claims is an online dispute resolution app that will help people resolve claims of under $2000 in a quick, efficient and user-friendly way! No more complicated forms!*
Osgoode Law School’s Justice Design program created a prototype for Law Speak, a tool for people going through the small claims process who are not fluent in the dominant language.
LawSpeak empowers those who may not speak English as a primary language to navigate the small claims court process. This app translates documents, keeps them in one place and provide additional features like a location services option that will help you find your way to the courthouse.
A team from the Winkler Institute’s Justice Design 2016 class created a game Legal Go, inspired by Pokemon Go, but for learning law. It’s a way to train lay people on what the legal system is and how it works, through a mixture of in-person adventures and on-the-phone characters, challenges, and rewards.
Their description:
Inspired by the Pokémon Go phenomenon, Legal Go is augmented reality legal education game that makes learning about the legal system fun and interactive. As you wander the city you can complete missions that will help you build skills in empathy, understanding the legal process, finding legal and community services, and resources.*
I took a photograph of this display in London Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5. It is a very public display of the customer feedback for the airport. It has the results of surveys for different factors of the airport experience, displayed right on the monitors that show flight times and other important information.
Could we build an application that would let a person, who receives a legal document or government document in the mail to:
Can we boil down all of the most essential things to know for a legal issue onto a business card?
We can list out What Not To Do, What to Say, What to Do, What to Expect. We could perhaps even diagram the procedure to expect.
The goal would be to give people a prep card that they can always have with them if they know a legal issue (like discrimination, arrest, family law problem, or something else) might crop up.
Or it could be for someone who is going through a legal process, and they need some help to remember where they are and what’s happening.
Could we remake the Self Help Center to be more colorful, friendly, and humanized?
This could be with more art on the wall, with more aesthetically and purposefully structured walls of resources. It could also have things for toddlers and other kids to focus on, so that they are focused, calm, and not distracting their parents and others.
At Self Help Centers, we observed that people got a lot of paper, but didn’t know exactly what to do with all of them.
The idea of a Resource Guide is that there would be a streamlined collection of resources, with forms, to-do lists, timelines, and maps. It would be akin to what new moms get from the hospital as they leave after giving birth. It would have everything organized, so the person feels confident that they have everything they need.
