Margaret Hagan, Dec 16, 2021
In Winter Quarter, our Lab Team is working with the Stanford Law CodeX team, to co-teach a new class at Stanford Law School. It is a hands-on, project-based class, about how to make insurance contracts more accessible, intelligent, and human centered. It builds on our past classes on user-friendly privacy policies, and contract design labs.
The class is 808L Human Centered Computable Contracts (https://law.stanford.edu/courses/policy-practicum-human-centered-computable-contracts/).
We will be working with regulators of the insurance industry & consumer protection advocates. The focus is ‘How can we develop more user-accessible models of insurance contracts, so that more people can be strategic & capable in this complex system?’
Students will be:
- Interviewing consumers about how they typically interact with insurance contracts (like in healthcare, housing, and otherwise). Also understand what consequences have happened for people, depending on how they’ve shopped for and used insurance.
- Map out key user breakdowns, incentives and interests, and behavioral heuristics that could support people’s strategic decision making
- Research what new tech models are possible, to make complex choices & documents more user-friendly
- Test prototypes for computable insurance contracts, to see if people can use them — what works & doesn’t
- Propose key principles, interfaces, and metrics for what makes a human-centered insurance contract
The class work will feed into the large initiatives in the law school, including CodeX’s Insurance Initiative. It will also be part of global research on proactive law, computable contracts, and new kinds of disclosure design.