This Jam has been a lengthy one as it was organized as a “special interest group activity” during the five days of the Information Design Summer School in Syros, Greece.
The Summer School has been organized by the Simplification Centre and the University of Aegean, and I had plans to attend it in any case, because some big guns in information design education were rolled out. Just to name a few, Rob Waller (the man behind the Simplification Centre and ex professor at Reading University), Clive Richards (president of the IIID and director of research at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design) and Karel van der Waarde (a leading expert on design of medical information and professor at Avans University of Applied Sciences).
Our interest group on legal design was composed by designers, lawyers, anything in between and a technical writer. In our afternoons of teamwork, we addressed our efforts towards the CISG (United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods), a treaty that is a uniform international sales law, ratified by 79 countries that account for a significant proportion of world trade, making it one of the most successful international uniform laws. This document is important because it is used by many companies in international trade, and it matters because when the supplier and the buyer do not draft their contract carefully, the CISG is there to provide a safety-net of default provisions.
Participants
Chris Edwards, Gonzalo Arellano, Helena Haapio, Julia Mariani, Oliver Tomlinson, Olivia Zarcate, Rob Waller, Stefania Passera
Results of the Jam
As the CISG is a lengthy and challenging document, we decided to focus on some topics that we found particularly important and relevant for its users. You can see some of these first visualizations collected here as a prototype booklet. The CISG Legal Design Jam Group is planning to continue their work on the CISG in the future, by creating further visualizations and improving the existing ones.