Episode 9: Towards Multisensory Legal Design with Colette R. Brunschwig

A good legal picture tells more than a 1000 words. That’s why visuality is a central feature of legal design. Where legal pictures can communicate legal information so efficiently that collective understanding of the key issues is created within seconds, unclear text-only legal documents can leave parties disputing over different interpretations of them for years. Visuality, however, is still rare in legal communication. The future of law does look brighter though, as there are signals towards a visual and even audiovisual and multisensory design of law. Our guest in this episode is Dr. Colette R. Brunschwig. She works as a Senior Research Associate at the Legal Visualization Unit, Department of Law, University of Zurich, Switzerland. We consider her as a true pioneer of legal design: she has been exploring the visual, audiovisual and multisensory design of legal or legally relevant content since the 1990’s. She tells us when and why legal design originated in her mind, what her initial understanding of legal design was, and how she currently conceptualizes it. Colette R. Brunschwig also conveys us how she has been contributing to spreading legal design. We also discuss the differences between visual law and legal design, the role of legal visualizations and humanoid robots as potential legal designers.