Beyond design thinking and into speculative futures in legal design

Abstract

The legal design movement has succeeded in proposing change to communities through collaboration between the legal and design professions. As a result, new kinds of empathetic solutions have been introduced where the citizen experience is prioritized over commercial goals. Still missing from legal design, however, is a stronger understanding of current theoretical literature in design that is questioning the ontology of the discipline and formulating new scenarios of transition toward the future. While proactive law looks to use law to avoid problematic futures, this paper encourages an embrace of speculative design methodologies to imagine the potential problems that need to be addressed before they cause irreparable harm. The Beirut Port blast is given as an example where law and design could have fruitfully collabo-rated to prevent catastrophe.