Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Navigation maps for all legal services in a jurisdiction

prototyping-access-to-justice-final-presentation-49

This concept proposal is to create a single map and wayfinding system for all the different types of legal services, across all kinds of different providers, in a jurisdiction. It can be a geographic map, as well as organizational and process map.

It would lay out where a person could go find help, and direct them to these different stops in a coherent and standard way.

It would have similar markers (like an i for Information, or a legal image) everywhere that a person could find legal help in a geographic area.

This concept comes from our class on Prototyping Access in Spring 2016.

Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Interactive Board of Resources

Legal Navigator Project - community board interactive resources

At courts, at community centers, at libraries, at cafes — can we have interactive boards full of resources and services that people could access?

Using a large touch screen, a court or clinic could have a Triage screen, a Resources Screen, or a Directions Screen. People could come up to ask a question or find resources.

The person could jump to the most relevant content — making it a more personalized experience, and to have an interactive experience akin to a human-to-human one.

Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Court traffic monitor

Legal_Design_Concepts - court traffic
Could we create a Schedule & Alert system to let litigants and court people know what the busy-ness & traffic level are?

Especially for litigants who have a choice about when they come into court (say to contest a traffic ticket) – couldn’t we help them decide when to come in, so that they can be in the least possible traffic.

It could be available online, on a website. You enter in your type of hearing and court building, and then you see approximate wait times. You could even get live reports if you’re thinking about going on a specific time today.

Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Courthouse Design: Insights from Zorza and Keating

In 1994, Richard Zorza and Judge Robert Keating published a paper full of insights from their attempt to redesign the interfaces that judges & court officials used when prosecuting drug offenders, in Midtown Community Court.

This quick 4-pager paper The Ten Commandments of Electronic Courthouse Design, Planning, and Implementation: The Lessons of the Midtown Community Court nicely summarizes their findings into ‘Commandments’.

Open Law Lab - 10 Commandments A2j courthouse

On his Access to Justice blog, Zorza also has some new reflections, two decades out, on the redesigns he proposed for the court interface. That blog post also includes images of his proposed redesigns (not included here) of what the judge would see when making sentencing decisions, and also follow-through mechanisms to make sure the court was keeping track of the defendant’s path.

Zorza writes that the point of their design project was giving court officials more oversight & resources when making sentencing decisions in drug courts.

…the key to the concept was to combine immediacy of actual consequences with close judicial monitoring, and real community input into policy.   As we designed the technology, a major goal was to ensure that judges got broad information before they made a sentencing decision, and also afterwards, so they could monitor ongoing compliance.  Important to the model was having a broad range of intermediate sanctions available for the judge to choose.

The pair proposed a design that would give a variety of information about the defendant to the judge, as well as tools to track & monitor the progress after sentencing.

Some of the designs weren’t accepted, but some user research came out of the project, in the form of the commandments. The commandments are sometimes particular to the project Zorza & Keating were working on, and not generalizable to other legal design projects. Others (in bold) are more relevant widely.

One: Start with an Electronic Judicial Desktop
Two: Build a Web of Electronic Relationships Between Court and Other Justice Agencies
Three: Design the System to Collect and Display Information About the Progress of the Case Within the Courthouse, as Well as Information About the Case Itself
Four: Imaging Is not Enough. The Issue is Document Collection and Display
Five: Use Graphical Interface Design for Courts
Six: Use Color, Flashing, and Positioning to Enhance Information
Seven: Use Technology to Enhance Community Access
Eight: Build Tools that Put Users in Charge; Do Not Make them Feel Controlled
Nine: Use Automated E-Mail to Build Connections Between People and Data
Ten: Recognize that an Integrated Computer System Has the Capacity to Make Fundamental Changes in the Way a Courthouse Works

Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Redesigning the Courthouse?

image

At Georgia Tech’s school of architecture, they are investigating the physical design of the courthouse experience.