I got to participate in Legal Design Summit organized in Helsinki 1st of November, 2017. It was a superfancy, official, relatively interesting event, but the presentations given left me a bit confused.

Legal Design is a movement where a design-approach is included to the planning and implementation of laws and legal practices. The idea is to make legal practices more approachable to normal people through taking into account that how normal people understand legal texts, what is important for them and how can we make everything more understandable.

In overall, I have a reasonable understanding in law (especially technology related), but I am not familiar with 'legal practices' at all. I guess that's why most of the presentations of the conference didn't appear relevant or concrete for me. Still, I am more than happy that there's people who are running this kind of movement.

// GDPR is good and important step. At least I believe so. Hopefully it's not wasting all the resources and opportunities to bureaucracy.
 

Some notes from the conference (I don't know if the slides where ever shared):

Designing for the Internet of (Legal) Things
Jose Torres

What is the role of law in product development
How are we designing law for the new medium
People are consuming law in digital services

(Print media - radio - TV development for example)

How does law fit into the process of designing a product?
How can the law be part of a great product, seamlessly?
How can we integrate law into user research?
How can we prototype legal experiences?
How can we get (legal)product/market fit? Enchancing user experience

How does law fit in the design process?
Business-Design-Tech-Legal/Policy

Intuitive - Usable - Simple - Legal

Law becomes part of the product stack

We need legal design framework for law
- legal design canvas

Law becomes a part of human-computer interaction when designing for digital
Law becomes a "device" when designing for IoT

(Legal) design for the new medium
- challenges: what would it look like to build a voice recognization/augmented reality/virtual reality experience with privacy baked in?

When Legal Design Meets the Semantic Web: Rethinking how we Interact with Data Protection
Arianna Rossi

GDPR and right to be informed:
- legal requirements in the GDPR
- visual representation of privacy notions
- legal design
- semi-automatic generation of privacy interfaces

GDPR: May 25 2018, non-EU companies, balance between data subjects and companies

Legal requirements vs users' behaviour in the GDPR
Transparency (much information) - Informed consent (many choices)

Privacy by design as legal requirement
- keep it transparent
- keep it user-centric

The novelty of visualization in the GDPR
- "machine-readable standardised icons"
- "easily visible, intelligible and clearly legible (overview of the intended processing)"

Lack of empirical testing causes shortcomings in existing privacy icon sets

THe GDPR in a nutshell
- data -> processing operation -> purposes
- data -> agents -> rights and obligations

A traditional textual privacy policy
-> a structural layer to hierarchically organize the document
- Akoma Ntoso http://www.akomantoso.org
- machine-readable privacy icons with formally represented meaning
- a layer of legal rules for automated reasoning