NLS Faculty Seminar | ‘Can Making A Law Be Playful? A Case For Designing For Democratic Deliberation in India’

In this week’s faculty seminar Varsha Aithala, Assistant Professor of Law, presented a paper titled ‘Can making a law be playful? A case for designing for democratic deliberation in India,’ with co-authors Siddharth Peter de Souza and Saumya Varma.

Siddharth Peter de Souza is the founder of Justice Adda, a law and design social venture in India. He is also an Assistant Professor in AI and Society at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. Saumya Varma, a senior consultant with Justice Adda, is a public policy professional with a background in legislative research and strategic consulting.

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of legal design as an imaginative and playful approach to developing, understanding, and disseminating law. Through a case study that discusses the development of a board game project titled ‘Sabha’ which is the outcome of a multi-year project by Justice Adda developed in partnership with the Hanns Seidel Stiftung, the paper explores what design can do to build meaningful deliberation in democratic societies. ‘Sabha’ is designed as a print-and-play interactive multiplayer board game. It seeks to immerse players in the ‘world’ of the Indian Parliament, and to inform and educate players about Parliamentary procedures, the roles and responsibilities of parliamentary representatives, and the process of law-making. The paper contextualises the need for ‘Sabha’ within the evolution of the Indian parliament and its relationship with the people it represents. By discussing concepts of ‘playful’ pedagogy in the development of the game, the paper explains that the value of using legal design in this process of game design. It argues that such an approach is valuable to not only to think beyond the typical form of the law, but also to be free of the typical spaces of the law.

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