Where law meets tech meets art
The Lawboratory Project explores a participatory approach to public legal education, raising awareness of cutting-edge legal research and generating law-related research by virtue of the learning yielded by extensive experimental public interactions. By this approach it aims to generate greater impact of research, innovation in research methodologies and new forms of research outputs.
Law, legal frameworks and regulations touch our lives in a million visible and invisible ways. While most of us accept they exist and will engage when necessary, most of us know little about them. Lawboratory will communicate, celebrate and challenge how people think about law. Engaging exhibits will be co-produced by creative practitioners, designers and legal scholars through iterative processes.
The exhibits will be open to the public, either for general or targeted audiences. This outreach will broaden the impact of legal scholarship and widen public engagement with law.
Lawboratory rests on the following principles:
Innovation — a playful, experimental, celebratory approach to public legal education, disseminating legal scholarship and generating novel research (in terms of theme and form) is innovative. Lawboratory aims to turn facts into learning, feelings and action.
Participation — Lawboratory will involve visitors in curated exhibits, offering them information or perspectives that engage their attention and emotions in an entertaining and captivating way. Trained mediators with appropriate expertise will assist the visitors to engage with the exhibit. The visitor may also become a consenting contributor of data to a research study related to the exhibit or another area of law.
Visitors’ reactions to the exhibit inspire or trigger further relevance to the exhibit for the researcher. As demonstrated by Michael John Gorman’s ‘Ideas Colliders’ exhibited at Trinity College Dublin’s Science Gallery in Dublin (and now replicated elsewhere), artistic collaboration with scientific research created exhibits to engage the public and collide yet more ideas:
‘Ideas Colliders – places to connect emerging research with the public, drawing the insights and concerns of the public into research, and through this process, transforming the role and relevance of the university itself.’
(MJ Gorman, Ideas Colliders, p152)
Lawboratory will do this for law.
For all – Lawboratory is essentially audience-centred with no limit at whom it is aimed. Some exhibits may be targeted at a specific sector of the community, while others will be for all.
Inspiration here is taken from Nina Simon’s OF/BY/FOR ALL approach to helping public institutions become more inclusive, equitable, and relevant to their communities.
Law – the overarching subject area is law which inevitably covers a vast array of possible themes, topics, angles, connections. Led by researchers’ interests, each exhibit will highlight an area of law of significance and relevance.
Impact – so much legal scholarship stays within the academy and the legal profession, yet so much of it has personal, societal and national significance. Lawboratory will aerate legal scholarship through playful and participatory exhibits to reach a broader audience.
The Team
Prof Eugene McNamee
Executive Director and founder-member of the Ulster Legal Innovation Centre, a Centre of collaboration between the Law School and the School of Computing and Intelligent Systems. With interests in legal education, technology as an anthropological process, information flow processes in complex communicative systems and Law & Film, his vision for Lawboratory combines these interests to evolve a culturally significant entity bridging the divide between creative and legal practice.
Dr Lucy Royal-Dawson
Research Associate on the Lawboratory Project. With a background in social justice and human rights research, rights-based and participatory methods and the curation of cinematic events, she manages the development of the project and steers its public legal education research objectives.