Legal Design Garden

 

In 2022, a group of environmental NGOs contacted us to help them to organize and lead a qualitative/explorative study of the potentials for success of a regulation of geothermal energy in the UK. While there have been some studies and reviews of the regulation of geothermal energy in both the UK and EU jurisdictions, they do not appear to reflect its potential importance in light of the policy salience of the regulation in question.

The primary need of the customer NGOs was to personalize communication on the internet in order to form new relevant policies, awareness campaigns, and new regulations.

In response to this request, our study aimed at discerning the ways in which the tangible salience of a regulation of geothermal energy in the UK and Europe could be measured.

Below you find the design process of how, based on Design Thinking methodology, we accomplished this legal design project.

 

1. Discovery
We first (re)discovered the actual statement of the problem our customers faced: we asked and answered the 5 Whys.

And we discovered that in order to measure the actual drivers needed to form new policies, awareness campaigns, and, eventually, the regulation of the geothermal energy, first and foremost we need to measure social desirability of achieving Carbon net zero by 2050.

So, the context changed from policy salience to social desirability, and the target study population—from politicians, regulators and scientists to citizens. Below is an example (the screen) of the first online collaborative mind map of the study.

 

2. Mapping

Once a sufficient amount of information has been collected in the discovery stage, this stage involved mapping the information in structured documents. 

We first tracked information in a sequential manner, and brainstormed ideas and solutions visualized in one place—a whiteboard mind map. 

We then mapped out the users journey that participants would go through if they participate in the study.

Underneath you find an example of a mind map of the study chart we used in the first user journey and co-creation sessions.

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3. Brainstorming

We then brainstormed in a team in order to build the prototype models of the solutions (protos). This was the stage where we built our protos and brainstormed in interdisciplinary teams (lawyers, sociologists, graphic designers, developers, linguists).

We mainly used Bullseye Diagrammes and storyboards: for the latter, we made 8 scenes of each idea, with 8 different ways in which each idea can be used by the users, including 8 templates of the citizen questionnaire we were aiming to build. 

4. Testing

We have put prototypes to test, gathered

feedback and refined each solution.

Once our target groups were defined, we first designed short questionnaires and the online invitations to interviews. (We tested the created content with our sponsor users before sending.)

In the next round, we organized offline group interviews, including observational study, in smaller groups of 8-15 participants. We thus figured out how citizens perceived the invitation and got better grasping on what the reasons were that people might be hesitant to support policies and regulations promoting meeting the net zero.

5. Evolving

Based on our observations and insights after testing, we understood the main advantages and pain points of our study content, and improved it accordingly. The main objectives were: (i) process the totality of feedback; (ii) edit protos; (iii) vet them.

We thus finalized the design of the study, held the final rounds of interviews and observational studies, and submitted the final results to the customers.

As said in the beginning, we discovered that it is not the degree of policy salience of the environmental regulation that we should measure before all else, but the social desirability of the regulation in question. Thanks to our study, our customers improved their outreach.