Abstract/Summary

This piece offers an insight into a practical, information-gathering workshop carried out as part of the ‘discover’ design phase of our project with the civil liberties organisation, Liberty. Liberty came to us with a challenge: to identify how information design might help to make their web-based legal advice more accessible, useful, and understandable. Our project focuses on three distinct topics within their advice provision: stop and search, police complaints and immigration. Designing information that will be used by people during intensively disruptive times in their lives – contexts in which the person needing information may themselves be under great pressure or experiencing feelings of disconnect or turmoil, poses significant challenges for the designer and we explore some of those here. Each of the three topics above involve very different contexts, and the hurdles clients face along their journeys are diverse as a result. The pandemic and resultant disruption meant that workshop needed to shift online, and we give a flavour of our methods, tools and findings in this chapter, as well as the aspects of the project that make it unique.