How many times have you thought about laws and how bored you might felt immediately? What if you would be given a chance to approach this area using different lenses. For instance, looking to the public services or legislative process as a “designer”?

Well, it has nothing in common you would argue… And yet…

For the last 1,5 years, I am involved in UNDP’s youth peacebuilding project on promoting social cohesion and interaction in border areas. One of the pre-conditions for social cohesion is ensuring equal rights for all young people by improving their access to primary legal aid and justice in Kyrgyzstan. As a part of the project, I was to find out what are the barriers for youth in exercising their right to access to justice as a peaceful tool to address their grievances and disputes. Another question was how young people define those barriers and what they understand under the primary legal aid in remote areas. To get answers to these questions, a participatory approach was vital. However, I was challenged by the lockdown due to the current pandemic as many others.

It pushed me to think over the tools used by the researchers and decision-makers worldwide to have more data and objective information. Online surveys seemed to be an option, but I knew I need more in-depth communication and youth engagement to create meaningful interaction. Last year I had a wonderful opportunity to learn from different experts about Legal Design in Helsinki Summit. So, I started to think about how Legal Design could be used and visually incorporated for better understanding the needs of young people in terms of access to justice and at the same time, to make the exchange process both interesting and creative. The idea of the workshop for youth on this topic became a perfect opportunity to start practicing and experimenting with my new knowledge.

Besides, Legal Design Thinking is human-centered and user-friendly tool, which can make laws, systems, services easy to comprehend. It presents documents in a more visual way pushing young minds to use different lenses to shape the problem, brainstorm on possible solutions, testing, and analyzing lessons learned. It also allows to interact and engage beneficiaries to the process. These advantages of the legal design drived me to use this tool and experiment it with youth on-line during the lockdown.

Thus, two online workshops were held with the participation of about 18 young women and men aged 15 to 28 from different border communities located in Jalalal-Abad, Batken, Osh provinces, Bishkek city in Kyrgyzstan and there were also few participants from Uzbekistan. I have used the on-line tool Mural that makes engagement and collaboration on legal design visual.

Few challenges that I came across with were that the online tool was in English and a translation of it into Kyrgyz and Russian were prepared in advance. Another challenge was that some participants used smartphones, instead of laptops or desktop computers, as not many have computers in rural areas I targeted my beneficiaries from. Nevertheless, everyone had a chance to interact and share their ideas and solutions in a creative way.

In the end, it was so rewarding to hear participants’ feedback. One of the participants Nurislam (16 years old) shared that after the workshop he feels much confident to share his ideas. “Now I know what to do in a conflict situation and where to apply for legal advice”, he said.

For Fatima (20 years old) it was very important to be given the opportunity to share her ideas and interact with her peers on-line. “This was a great opportunity to collaborate visually and feel engaged. I am glad that my ideas found their place in a common canvas along with the ideas of my friends”- she said.

I was very glad that despite of the Pandemic I have managed to conduct planned workshops within the project at least online as it still allowed me to get answers to my questions on challenges that young people come across with in terms of access to justice and also to hear their voice on the solutions. Legal Design helped young people not only to better understand the concept of the legal system, but also helped them to understand how to establish interaction; how to create services meeting the needs of youth in border areas, etc., which in its turn, allows to improve social cohesion and impacts on conflict prevention on the local level.

Overall, it was absolutely worth trying!