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 Procedural Guide

Interactive Legal Maps

Open Law Lab - Visual Law - Interactive Legal Maps

I’ve been prototyping various means to deliver & build legal knowledge — with a specific consideration of bolstering Access to Justice. One pathway, of course, is Visualized Law.

I’ve been playing with it with cartoons and illustrations, and in other forms (hyperlinked, layered checklists — visual expert systems).

One promising prototype is the Visual Mind Map, that is hyperlinked & lively with images, videos, & other cues that can guide the user through. The promise of such a map is that it lets the user locate themselves in a specific cluster of resources within a broader field of information. They can see the broad scope of the area they are in, while still focusing in on what precise information they need to retrieve & actions they need to pursue.

What would such an interactive legal mind map look like in practice? See this embedded Popplet for a first generation play with this format. I’ve used Popplets a lot for my own brainstorming, paper-writing, research, and collaborations with teams. I know there is great potential in scoping out a version of such a mind-mapping specifically for legal resources.

I see a future mash-up of interactive mind map diagrams with a curated, semi-open wiki format. I would love all the legal knowledge and advice out there on a specific legal problem to be extracted out of forums, pamphlets, q-and-as, blog posts, news articles, and other random clips of text around the web — and diagrammed out clearly & visually (if not beautifully too).

I can understand legal topics better when they are composed on the page in a meaningful way, and my guess is that most people with legal problems who are searching around the Internet would also benefit from a Legal Map to ground them & guide them. No more blocks of text!

Another kind of navigator, that shows you how to get from point A to point B, from problem to resolution — this one came out of our immigration hackathon.

Legal Design Projects - title cards-12 - interactive legal map