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The Legal Icon Dictionary

Aneta Baranowska

LinkedIn

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About this work

Legal documents are notoriously difficult to understand due to their complexity, formal language, and abstract terminology. This creates a communication barrier between legal professionals and their clients, particularly non-lawyers who are often the intended recipients of these documents. Our work addresses this issue through the development of a visual tool: the Legal Icon Dictionary.

The Legal Icon Dictionary is a curated set of intuitive, standardized icons that represent key legal terms and concepts. It functions as a visual layer that can be integrated into legal documents - such as contracts, terms and conditions, and privacy policies - to support and clarify written content. The dictionary transforms abstract or ambiguous legal ideas into concrete, visual symbols that enhance comprehension and reduce cognitive load.

In co-creation of legal designers, graphic designers, and users, we mapped common legal concepts that are difficult to interpret and translated them into universally understandable icons. The process involved user research, iterative prototyping, and validation to ensure each icon conveyed its intended meaning. What inspired this project was a very practical challenge: even when lawyers want to make their documents more accessible by using visual elements, they often struggle to find the right tools. Searching through hundreds of icons online or trying to assemble visuals in office software can be frustrating and time-consuming. Our goal was not only to make documents easier to understand for end users, but also to make them easier to create for legal professionals. In its current format, the Legal Icon Dictionary consists of the:

• 1. report from our research
• 2. ready-to-use set of icons
• 3. and manual full of tips on how to use them

– free for everyone to download and implement into their work. It reflects our commitment to demystifying the law through design, accessibility, and empathy.

Impact

The Legal Icon Dictionary has had an impact on both legal professionals and document recipients. By providing a ready-to-use, thoughtfully designed set of icons, we enabled lawyers - especially those taking their first steps into legal design—to create clearer, more user-friendly documents without the typical frustration of searching for visuals or struggling with formatting. We know of instances where the icons have been implemented into real-life legal documents, such as terms of service, privacy policies, and contracts. The icons helped clarify the structure and meaning of the text, resulting in more accessible and transparent communication for end users.

Beyond document design, the Icon Dictionary has become a valuable resource in our legal design workshops. We use it as both a practical tool and an educational example of how visual thinking can improve legal communication. It allows participants to experience first-hand how even small design interventions - like the addition of icons - can have a significant (good or bad, depending on the use!) effect on the document created.

By addressing the needs of both document creators and users, the Icon Dictionary continues to promote a more human-centered approach to law, lowering barriers to understanding and empowering legal professionals to innovate.

Key learnings

One of our key learnings was that visual tools can significantly enhance the accessibility of legal information - but only when used in the right context. While icons have the potential to clarify complex content, we discovered that without supporting context, users often interpreted them in unintended ways. This underlined the abstract nature of symbols: an icon on its own is rarely self-explanatory. Providing a clear use-case or embedding the icon within a familiar legal structure improved user understanding and reduced misinterpretation.

We also learned that even minor visual details - like the presence or absence of a magnifying glass - can dramatically alter how icons are perceived. Users tended to over-focus on specific graphic elements, leading to unexpected associations. As a result, icon design must be tested with real users and refined, as small changes can have a huge impact on usability.

A positive takeaway was that icons resembling familiar visual systems (e.g., from Office or mobile apps) were more easily understood. Leveraging users' existing visual literacy helped ground abstract legal concepts in something intuitive.

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Law & Tea: Community Dialogues for Everyday Justice

Olive Mumbo

OliveHarbor Global Solutions

LinkedIn

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About this work

At OliveHarbor Global Solutions (OGS), we are developing Law & Tea—a community-based legal conversation series that brings everyday justice discussions into warm, welcoming spaces.

Many people—especially youth, women, informal workers, and migrants—don’t access legal support because traditional spaces feel intimidating or inaccessible. To respond, Law & Tea offers a low-cost, dialogue-based alternative, hosted in-person at local centres and cafés, and virtually via small Zoom circles. Each session features:

• A real-life legal scenario or story
• A visual “cheat sheet” or guide to simplify legal concepts
• A trained facilitator to guide the discussion
• A relaxed space where tea is shared and questions are welcomed

Topics range from housing disputes and job contracts to school rights and reporting abuse. The approach blends legal education, storytelling, and community care—without jargon or fear. The sessions are co-created with local youth groups and grassroots organisations in Kenya and Italy.

By designing Law & Tea for both physical and virtual access, we’re making space for justice conversations that meet people where they are—emotionally, geographically, and socially.

Impact

Still in the early pilot phase, we’ve hosted initial Law & Tea sessions in Nairobi (in-person) and Vicenza (virtually), reaching young people, community educators, and migrant leaders.

The relaxed and inclusive format has helped participants open up, ask questions, and begin to connect legal knowledge with their lived experiences. Several organisations have requested toolkits to host their own sessions, and we’re working on expanding this model based on the feedback received.

Key learnings

We learned that building trust is foundational to legal learning. Hosting conversations over tea—whether around a physical table or a virtual screen—encourages openness and reduces fear.

We also learned that low-tech tools like story cards, visual handouts, and real-life scenarios are highly effective across languages and educational levels. The model can be adapted for civic education, environmental rights, mental health awareness, or gender justice.

Other organisations can easily replicate Law & Tea by using a facilitation guide, visual materials, and trusted local hosts.

Meet me at the conference

We’re excited to discuss how low-cost, low-barrier legal design can support meaningful access to justice. Law & Tea shows that with community care, cultural humility, and creativity, we can turn ordinary moments into opportunities for empowerment.

We also look forward to learning how others are facilitating hybrid legal learning spaces, and how design can better support inclusion in both digital and offline formats.

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Designing for Justice: Lessons from CatholicCare’s Refugee Hub

Alice Neikirk

College of Human and Social Futures/ Newcastle Law School

LinkedIn

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About this work

In 2023–24, a legal design project with CatholicCare’s Refugee Hub followed a five-step participatory design process, widely recognized in legal design practice. But as the project unfolded, we discovered something important: the standard approach doesn’t fully account for the realities of working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Key insights from the project:

Time and patience matter. The design process often takes longer than expected—especially when building trust and understanding across cultures. Typical funding cycles may not allow for the flexibility needed. Culture shapes design. Cultural norms and communication styles influence how people engage with legal resources. These factors must be thoughtfully integrated into every stage of the process.

Service providers are essential partners. Rather than being peripheral, service providers should be central collaborators. Their insights and relationships with the community are vital for creating resources that truly work. Sustainability is a design step. To ensure long-term impact, the final step in the design process should focus on sustaining relationships and engagement. This means building strategies for ongoing collaboration and resource use beyond the project’s end.

By placing these considerations at the heart of legal design theory and practice—and adding “sustaining” as a formal step—we can create tools that better serve diverse communities and contribute meaningfully to a more accessible justice system. Our work has created specific resources but also further developed the legal design process.

Impact

Over 18 months we co-designed two printed resources to support the community's understanding of the Special Humanitarian Visa Process and Australia's driving laws. These were two areas where low legal literacy significantly impacting on people’s lives. For the visa, it meant people could not make informed decisions regarding the likelihood of success (less than 10%), or the waiting time (often decades). For the driving guide, it meant people were going to court to contest charges which led to a criminal conviction. Criminal convictions can mean they cannot become citizens.

We have hosted workshops in three different languages to determine if the visa resource improved legal literacy - and it did! People had a better understanding of the visa options available to them and the steps to apply for the visa. The resource has been translated into five key languages.

The traffic guide is used by four different organizations. This guide has been particularly useful for service providers who are not familiar with the laws, but provide legal guidance to clients.

Key learnings

The legal design process itself can increase the capacity of communities. It provides a forum for them to speak into the issues that impact on them, ask questions, and through co-creation, increase their ability to explain the issues to other people.

Good design takes time, especially when working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It is important to take the time to build a team who represents a variety of experiences and expertise. It takes time to build trust, to ensure people can speak into the process as equals. Respecting cultural norms, like Ramadan, mourning periods, or the need to travel internationally for extended periods, can also mean that the project will take more time. Time needs to be invested at the end as well, to ensure it continues to reflect the needs of the community.

During the translation process, we also learned that AI can be a powerful tool for simplifying complex language. However, it must also be used cautiously as it can change the meaning of the language.

Meet me at the conference

I would love to connect with other people doing co-design to support communities from migration backgrounds.

The next step of our design project is to transform parts of our written resources into reel-style videos. Particularly for the guide to driving in Australia, our younger audience does not find the printed resources (or virtual version) engaging. This is an exciting new challenge - how to translate key information into an accessible format that will appeal to younger people.

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Alice Neikirk

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Three design artefacts: where does legal end and design begin?

Jutta Suksi

VTT

LinkedIn

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About this work

I will introduce three different types of artefacts that I have created and leave it up to you to decide what part of it is legal design and what is closer to business or research.

• 1. Spectrum of IP protection meets AI as a hybrid asset: The first work is an illustration that combines legal and technical aspects relating to AI. The illustration aims to gap knowledge from two very different areas, legal and technical, in order to understand the interlinkages, challenges and opportunities embedded in the use of AI in society.
• 2. Business model innovation map for open assets: The second work is a business model innovation map that collects 27 open-source software (OS) business models, 5 business model categories from open data (OD) and 4 from open hardware (OH) into a holistic map. The map is meant to navigate through the multifaceted business model landscape of open assets.
• 3. Guidebook: Data ecosystems for smart sustainable cities: The third work is an interactive pdf-tool dedicated to the development of data ecosystems and the promotion of data sharing to advance smart city initiatives. Our objective was to collect guidelines, share valuable insights, and present practical examples to assist all stakeholders within a smart city in building data ecosystems and enhancing data sharing practices.

These works have been made in research projects ZOOOM (ZOOOM – 3Os and IP awareness raising for collaborative ecosystems (zooom4u.eu)) and DataMust ( Markets for Sustainable Cities - VTT's Research Information Portal) funded by the European union and Business Finland.

Impact

All artefacts aim to give a diverse group of users easy access to complex knowledge that contains multidisciplinary elements, for instance legal, business and research aspects.

1. Spectrum of IP protection meets AI as a hybrid asset: With the visualization, the user can investigate questions relating to AI in a more structured manner – for instance, what kind of legal challenges arise with respect to different components involved or what kind of ethical questions may arise in different phases of the machine learning process.

2. Business model innovation map for open assets: A company can use the map to navigate through the multifaceted business model landscape of open assets. A company can explore the map to investigate the opportunities embedded in these business models and use it as a base for the innovation of its own business model.

3. Guidebook: Data ecosystems for smart sustainable cities: The guidebook outlines essential elements and phases involved in the process of building data ecosystems. A city itself or a company involved in smart sustainable city ecosystems can use it for building a clear vision, developing the necessary capabilities for forming, growing, and operating data ecosystems, adopting regulatory frameworks, and fostering collaborative innovation.

Key learnings

For me, one of the key learnings from the above work has been in understanding how design work intertwines with substance work, be it legal, business or other. Designers do not work merely to produce a final artefact, like the maps or guidebooks presented above. Visual thinking and design should be used also for the intermediate steps to enhance the substance thinking. This phase of the work is closely connected to substance knowledge and requires multidisciplinary capabilities, often several participants.

In legal design, this emphasises the need for constant, iterative discussions between legal experts and design experts. And, as legal design is there to resolve a problem for different types of users from several expert disciplines or technological fields, this iterative process requires interaction with several other fields.

This kind of multidisciplinary design process calls for different design methods and tools for different phases. One might use systemic design tools to understand the problem, for instance how business and legal issues interact, then turn into service design methods to increase understanding on the user and finally to produce an artefact that helps the user in resolving the problem at hand.

Meet me at the conference

I would like to discuss with you all varieties existing in legal design:

• o How does working in a design-driven way affect your work as a lawyer and vice versa?
• o What kind of legal design artefacts have you produced for different users to solve the problem at hand – for instance contracts, documentation, communication, legal tech?
• o What types of design methods and tools could be used in different phases of the design process – for instance service design, systemic design, tools for visual thinking and multidisciplinary exploration?
• o How do you work as a legal designer – What kind of intermediate steps of design do you take – What does your design process look like?

Or come and chat with me on any legal or design or legal design problem you are facing currently!

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The Gallery
Scaling people-centered justice: A Justice Innovation Lab Approach

Zainab Malik

HiiL: Dedicated to People-centred Justice

LinkedIn

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About this work

HiiL’s Justice Innovation Lab (JIL) addresses one of the world’s most urgent challenges: the justice gap. We know that justice problems, whether related to land, family, crime, or neighbour disputes, are common and have a serious impact on people’s lives. Yet, more than two-thirds of the world’s population still fail to find resolution. It’s clear that justice systems are not meeting people’s everyday needs.

This is where people-centred justice comes in. It’s an emerging approach that transforms justice systems by putting people and their justice needs at the centre, rather than institutional interests.

An integral tool for advancing this approach is the Justice Innovation Lab—a structured, design-thinking process that brings together a diverse group of stakeholders, including government leaders, judges, lawyers, community organisers, entrepreneurs, and users of justice. The process starts with data. Using insights from HiiL’s Justice Needs and Satisfaction (JNS) surveys and other research, the participants identify the most frequent and impactful justice problems people face. They then map user journeys to understand the barriers they encounter and use these insights to guide the co-creation of practical, locally grounded solutions. Over four to six months, co-create solutions, test ideas, prototype, build governance structures and sustainable financial models, and design pilot programmes ready for implementation. What makes the JIL unique is its deep commitment to local ownership, relevance and sustainability. In addition to formal justice actors, the Lab includes informal providers and people who have experienced justice problems firsthand. This broad participation ensures that both the design process and the solutions are not only innovative but truly people-centred.

Inspired by innovation labs in health, education, and finance, the JIL adapts this method specifically for the justice sector: one of the most under-innovated public services. It provides the structure, tools, and collaborative space needed to create justice services that are scalable, sustainable, and genuinely solve people’s justice problems.

Impact

One example of impact from our work was in Ethiopia, where over 7 million legal issues arise annually—most remaining unresolved. Many people rely on shimagillé, respected community elders, to mediate disputes. However, both this traditional system and the formal justice system have been overwhelmed by demand, highlighting the need for innovation.

In cooperation with the Federal Government of Ethiopia, HiiL’s Justice Innovation Lab process led to the development of the Community Justice Center (CJC) model. Drawing on the success of customary courts in Oromia and the trusted role of shimagillé, the CJCs integrate traditional dispute resolution with formal mechanisms such as case referrals. This hybrid approach reduces pressure on courts while preserving cultural values and aligning with international human rights standards.

In 2025, CJCs have been launched in Addis Ababa, Afar, and Sidama regions, showing strong government support and potential for scale. Community justice models developed by the Justice Innovation Labs are also currently being piloted in Ogun State and Imo State in Nigeria. This work is transforming access to justice—bringing it closer to the people who need it most.

Key learnings

A core learning from our work is that innovation in justice is not just about new tools or ideas : it’s about systems transformation. We learned that justice solutions must move from the fringes and form part of the key justice journeys people follow to resolve their justice problems. To truly deliver people-centred justice, we must create an enabling environment: incorporating innovations through legal and regulatory frameworks, policy planning, and budgets. For example, community-based services that link formal and informal systems can be highly effective—but only when their outcomes are recognised and supported by courts and institutions.

We also caution against the "app-ification" of justice. While tech can improve access, it can also deepen inequalities. In Uganda, where internet access is limited, an online justice tool developed through our JIL had to be delivered through kiosks staffed by community workers. In Tunisia, stakeholders combined online and offline tools to deliver doorstep legal support through apprentice lawyers and paralegals.

These lessons apply across sectors: real innovation requires inclusive design, system integration, and context-sensitive delivery. Data, collaboration, and enabling environments must be the foundation of all innovation.

Meet me at the conference

I look forward to hearing from attendees how they have managed to move solutions from design to implementation, and what they have learned on this journey.

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HiiL Website

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Designing Trust: L’Oréal’s Employee Privacy Policies Reimagined Through Legal Design

Laura Fauqueur | Alexandra Sabbe Ferri

Legal Shake | SAGAN Avocats

LinkedIn

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About this work

L’Oréal’s HR Data Privacy team needed to communicate their Global Privacy Policy to employees worldwide. The original version,16 pages of legal language in Word format, was compliant but unreadable. The challenge: create clarity, foster engagement, and build trust across 90,000 employees, from factory to HQ.

Legal Shake and Sagan Legal Design partnered to tackle this through legal design. We conducted deep research on L’Oréal’s internal culture, employee profiles, digital usage, and HR compliance goals. We mapped stakeholders, built personas and empathy maps, and explored the user journey to identify friction points.

The key question driving our design brief: How might we show employees that taking control of their data helps them achieve their personal goals safely?

The result: an interactive, digital tool, designed in Figma and implemented on L’Oréal’s SharePoint. Its tone, structure and interface made complex information actionable, accessible on any device, in any country.

We added playful games to boost engagement and ensure understanding of the policy. Following the global rollout, we were entrusted with adapting the format for France’s Local Privacy Policy.

Building on this success, we designed a Consents Portal, giving employees clarity and control over the use of their personal data.

What started as a static document became a dynamic legal ecosystem. The approach proved scalable, desirable, and replicable, redefining how legal content can be communicated and trusted within global organisations.

Impact

The redesigned Global Privacy Policy was viewed by thousands of employees at launch, with immediate positive feedback. HR and legal teams saw a clear increase in understanding, interaction, and meaningful questions from employees about data use.

This success led to the localisation of the tool for the French market, then to the development of the Consents Portal. That platform is now live and used daily, empowering employees to manage their own data choices in real time.

Each tool is a legal product but also a cultural signal. Employees see that privacy isn’t imposed; it’s co-designed with them in mind. Legal and HR teams saw the added value: more transparency, fewer misunderstandings, stronger engagement.

Together, these tools form a strategic ecosystem that aligns legal compliance with a respectful, empowering employee experience redefining how legal content is communicated at scale.

Key learnings

This project proved that transforming legal understanding is not about simplifying law, but about designing for people. Legal design helped us bridge legal compliance and user engagement.

Key takeaways:
• • Empathy is strategy: Researching users’ needs and fears is essential for relevance and trust.
• • Visual structure drives clarity: Layout, hierarchy, colour and navigation shape legal comprehension.
• • Iteration builds quality: Each test cycle refined the clarity, usability, and visual coherence of the tools.

Our methods are widely transferable to other companies, industries, and jurisdictions particularly where digital user experience meets legal complexity (e.g., consents, terms, onboarding, internal policies).

Meet us at the conference

Right now, our main concern is: How might we integrate more fun and more beauty into legal experiences?

We’d love to exchange ideas and stories about how you’ve brought fun and beauty into your own legal design work, what worked, what surprised you, what you’d try again.

We’re also keen to explore replicability: How might we maintain clarity and compliance across languages, cultures, and regulations within large organisations? And how might we redesign consents, rights requests, or onboarding experiences as part of a better digital legal UX?

We’re looking forward to hearing what others are working on and building new collaborations!

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Global Privacy Policy

Local Privacy Policy

Consents Portal

Sagan Legal Shake

Legal Shake

The Gallery
RCaaS: Redesigning Compliance to Serve People, Not Just Systems

Caroline Muchina

Founder | Savannah Consulting

LinkedIn

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About this work

My work is a strategic and service-oriented framework titled Regulatory Compliance as a Service (RCaaS), designed to tackle the complex, fragmented, and often inaccessible nature of regulatory compliance across institutions, particularly in Kenya and Africa. Positioned at the intersection of governance, regulation, and digital transformation, RCaaS offers a modular, human-centred approach to rethinking legal systems within private and public sectors.

Rooted in my role as Head of Legal at a leading public health training institution, and inspired by years of public service, I developed RCaaS in response to recurring compliance bottlenecks, slow policy execution, opaque bureaucratic processes, and the growing demand for digitised governance. My work has been shaped by the urgent need to demystify regulation for public institutions, ensuring laws and policies don’t just exist, but actually work for people.

The RCaaS framework combines:

• Regulatory Compliance Advisory – licensing, statutory obligations
• Risk & Compliance Management Consulting – risk registers, policy alignment
• Legal Operations & Contract Management – CLM systems, automation workflows
• Cybersecurity & Data Protection Advisory – best practices, vendor selection
• Regulatory Change Monitoring – tracking legal reforms across Africa

The format is both a framework and a consultancy model, supported by technology and grounded in empathy. It offers structured yet adaptable solutions to help institutions modernize legal operations while improving transparency, and maintain regulatory readiness amid constant change.

The concept matured during my certification at MIT’s LegalTech in the Digital Era program, where I gained deeper insight into legal design, automation, and ethical tech use. RCaaS is ultimately a call to make law work better for people through intelligent, inclusive, and scalable design.

Impact

The RCaaS framework has helped bridge the gap between regulatory intention and real-world implementation in complex institutional environments. By integrating digital tools into legal and compliance processes, my work has enabled public institutions to reduce delays, improve transparency, and build a culture of proactive governance.

For example, in my current role, we digitised contract workflows, streamlined board governance using an eBoard system, and introduced compliance roadmaps that have reduced approval turnaround times by over 40%. This not only increased institutional efficiency but also improved stakeholder trust and accountability.

More broadly, the framework has sparked dialogue about how legal operations and regulatory adherence can be reimagined, not through more bureaucracy, but through clarity, accessibility, and human-centred technology. RCaaS is now informing cross-sector discussions on how to simplify compliance in areas like healthcare, education, and licensing, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

The most meaningful impact has been shifting legal culture: from reactive enforcement to strategic enablement. Institutions are beginning to see compliance not as a burden, but as a service; one that, when designed well, empowers both institutions and the citizens they serve.

Key learnings

1. Start small and show results. Legal transformation doesn’t have to be large-scale to be meaningful. Solving one pain point at a time builds trust, grows momentum, and easily earns you institutional buy-in.
2. Designing with, not for, users. Legal solutions must reflect the lived realities of those navigating them. Human-centred design is not just a technique, it’s a mindset.
3. Simplification is a superpower. The most effective compliance tools are the ones that make the law clearer, not more complicated.
4. Cross-functional collaboration is essential. The best outcomes come from working across disciplines; bringing together lawyers, policymakers, and users to co-create solutions.
5. Context is everything. What works in one jurisdiction or sector may fail in another. Localisation must be part of every legal innovation strategy.

Meet me at the conference

I am excited to connect with attendees and to exchange ideas on how legal systems can be redesigned to truly serve people, especially in complex, resource-limited environments. I look forward to sharing insights from my RCaaS framework, discussing the realities of digital transformation in African public institutions, and exploring how we can localise LegalTech without losing sight of empathy, equity, and context.

I am also keen to learn how others are tackling regulatory complexity in their regions, how they’re integrating design thinking into compliance, and how we can move from static laws to living systems. Mostly, I am looking forward to conversations that are bold, practical, and human, whether we’re talking about CLM tools, policy reform, or that one time someone tried to run a big procurement on WhatsApp.

The Gallery
Human OversAIght: the Ops Room

Joaquín Santuber

Research Group Lead | Metaverse Lab, JKU Linz

LinkedIn

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About this work

HUMAN OVERSAIGHT: THE OPS ROOM is a real-time generative, interactive audio-visual installation developed as a human oversight department for high-risk AI systems. It is established according to the European Artificial Intelligence Act [EU AI Act], as described in Article 14, which suggests that in high-risk AI systems a human-machine interface such as a “stop button” is needed, to bring the system to a halt.

Can the system be stopped by a button, and why not? We investigate how can a human oversee and evaluate these processes, by visualising the internal operations of an automated system. We invite the visitors to take upon a central role in human oversight of high-risk AI systems and encourage them to engage with a human-machine interface to oversee the systems' operations. We provide possibilities for action for people to claim back their political agency to stop or affect the system.

Interaction

Participants are able to use a physical interface*, to navigate and control the visual input on the LED wall. The imagery shown on the wall is a mix of real-time surveillance input, including a face detection software, as well as synthetic imagery created via custom-made machine learning-based models.

While interacting, and navigating this content, the participants are directly affecting the algorithm, changing the content on the screen in real-time. Each activity is logged, irreversibly changing the system and its content. In such interactive feedback loop, we explore how quickly human input can affect a seemingly organised system, and change its rules. Besides the real-time visual output, we present the logs, which are anonymously stored.

Moreover, this installation presents the first human-computer interface for AI oversight and stop-button available to the public, as a tool for oversight, simulation, and agency.

Impact

The guiding question of the project is: How can people and communities regain their political power by engaging in human-oversight of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems? More concrete: the EU AI Act proposes new concepts that leave many questions open to be answered—for example related to the human oversight of high-risk AI systems. Instead of leaving these questions to the experts, lawyers, engineers, programmers and designers, we believe people should give meaning to these abstract concepts by immediate experience and real-time interaction. The project offers embodied and situated ways for social participation in the definition of the AI legalities—what is legal-illegal, lawful-unlawful, right or wrong. In the HUMAN OVERSIGHT installation through an immersive, physical and embodied experience participants have the opportunity to engage with the first human-oversight interface designed for public participation, while constructing a meaningful socio-political understanding of EU AI regulation and the role they play in defining how they are affected by AI in their daily lives.

Key learnings

Human OversAIght takes an artistic approach to dealing with the questions of the law, while designing an oversight system. Working on this project with artists opened up new possibilities on how to translate a new legal institution into an aesthetic experience. As an artwork, it is not limited to the need to be functional or the required usability.

Our driving force is a deep belief and commitment that law and democracy offer the best alternatives to the monopoly of power and control by the Big Tech –HOWEVER our current legal systems need help in becoming more actionable, tangible, and closer to people. By making legal concepts and imaginaries tangible, people can interact and embody new roles that provides awareness and confidence to regain their political power about the limits and possibilities of AI—people have something to say and do about it, they just need the spaces to do so!

Making such processes and tasks experienceable to a general audience –people likely without any professional knowledge in technical or legal field– can expose a critical insight into specific and concrete challenges of navigating the role in the automated decision-making processes under human oversight, while enhancing social awareness and technical demands that are intersecting at the developed scenario in the EU AI Act being taken into action.

Meet me at the conference

I look forward to speaking with attendees about the opportunities and challenges of taking an artistic approach to legal design.

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Project authors

Kristina Tica is an artist and researcher, with her practice spanning from visual arts to coding, writing, and music. She investigates the intersections of the aesthetics and ethics of machine learning applications in visual computational processes, and by combining research in critical AI and law she is pursuing a PhD degree at the Metaverse Lab, JKU. Her work has been exhibited internationally and published in Leonardo Journal (57) and The Practice of Art and AI (2021) by Hatje Cantz.
ticakristina.com

Joaquín Santuber is a lawyer who obtained his PhD in Design and IT Systems from the Hasso-Plattner Institute, Germany. As a research group lead at the Metaverse Lab, LIFT_C, JKU, he works with art-based and design approaches to legality. He has been an Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Los Andes, a research fellow at the HIIG, Berlin, and the University of Coimbra. He is Visiting Professor at the School of Design, UC, Chile and editor of the LD Journal.
www.linkedin.com/in/joaquinsantuber

Acknowledgements

The project is supported by Linz Institute of Technology – LIT Projects at Ars Electronica Festival 2025 funded by the State of Upper Austria in collaboration between Johannes Kepler University Linz and Ars Electronica Festival Linz. With special thanks to LIT Robopsychology Lab and VAME.