Introduction Human-centered design has been a dominant innovation methodology in service industries, from medicine to insurance to finance.1 It has now come to the legal system, together with movements related to legal technology, legal hacking, and access to justice reform, as a collective legal design movement.2 University labs, conferences, classes, and new job positions are oriented around “legal design”—the marriage of a human-centered design approach to the challenges and structures of the legal system.3 This burgeoning community of people is interested in using a design approach to improve the legal system.4 In light of this growth, the need arises for more rigor: rigor in how a design process is applied, in how design research is conducted, and in how the outcomes of this process and research are evaluated. Further discussion is needed to ground this design work, which is often creative, decentralized, and open, in an essential set of methods and instruments. These parameters can ensure honest reflection on how well the design approach can serve the legal system, improve people’s access to justice, and promote innovation in this professional community. This special issue presents pieces from lawyers, designers, technologists, scholars, and community organizers that detail what legal design is in practice. The pieces demonstrate how the craft of legal design is developing as one that combines a communityoriented co-design ethos, with a commitment to navigating the bureaucracies of the legal system to effect change, and with the integration of empirical research to evaluate whether user-centered design and policy proposals do, in fact, improve people’s outcomes. Before readers dive into this collection of cases, this introductory piece gives some initial grounding. It offers an initial legal design process, set of research methodologies and instruments, and grounding in analogous fields and literature. It also offers a wider theory of change—of how a design approach can feed into

中文翻译：

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作为一种事物的法律设计：一种变革理论和一套构建以人为本的法律体系的方法

需要进一步讨论以在一套基本的方法和工具中为这项通常具有创造性、分散性和开放性的设计工作奠定基础。这些参数可以确保对设计方法如何为法律系统服务、改善人们诉诸司法的机会以及促进这个专业社区的创新做出诚实的思考。本期特刊展示了律师、设计师、技术专家、学者和社区组织者的作品，详细介绍了实践中的法律设计。这些作品展示了法律设计工艺如何发展成为一种结合了以社区为导向的协同设计精神，致力于引导法律系统的官僚机构以实现变革，并结合实证研究来评估是否以用户为中心事实上，设计和政策建议确实 改善人们的成果。在读者深入研究这一系列案例之前，这篇介绍性文章给出了一些初步的基础。它提供了一个初步的法律设计过程、一套研究方法和工具，以及类似领域和文献的基础。它还提供了更广泛的变化理论——关于设计方法如何融入