Phase Two – Systems Planning and Design

The Systems Planning and Design phase began in January 2001, with the Institute of Design’s Systems and Systematic Design Workshop. This class consisted of 22 graduate-level students, consisting of 4 law students from Chicago-Kent College of Law and 18 design students from the Institute of Design.

Under the supervision of Professor Charles Owen, Professor Ronald W. Staudt, Edward B. Pedwell and in cooperation with Paula Hannaford and Nicole Mott from the NCSC staff, the teams continued the exploration of existing pro se assistance programs by identifying the processes and issues faced by self-represented litigants while employing a computer-supported planning process called Structured Planning. Using this methodology, the students were tasked with developing a system that would redesign court processes, removing barriers and providing self-represented litigants with efficient and effective access to the justice system.

To begin this Phase of the project, the 22-person project team was organized into five teams of four or five members. Each team was given the responsibility to analyze a mode of the legal process which, for this purpose, was divided roughly along a timeline into the following five categories; diagnosis, preparation, alternative dispute resolution (ADR), hearing, and enforcement. Alternative dispute resolution, a mode not usually restricted to a fixed position in the timeline, was treated as a process that might occur at any time in a litigant’s experience with the legal system.

In keeping with the Structured Planning methodology of Project Definition, Information Development, Information Structuring, Concept Development, and Communication (see Structured Planning at a Glance), this phase of the project was divided into six segments

The first segment required the five teams to define the problem by looking at issues important to the problem as a whole and to their particular mode of interest - Project Definition. The result of the work was a Charter that set out the project and a set of Defining Statements that raised critical issues and established positions to be taken on them.

Starting with the data gathered in Phase One, the students began to gain insights into the major barriers to justice for self-represented litigants - Information Development. The numerous design factors gathered during the investigation phase represented a collection of unedited thoughts that contained undeveloped ideas, unexplored observations, intriguing concepts, criticisms and general observations of the judicial system. To further understand the judicial system, two students visited each of the participating jurisdictions accompanied by representatives from the NCSC and a faculty member. The site visits occurred as follows:

Using all the data that was collected during the first phase and the site visits, the students were able to gather and process information about the judicial system during the initial stages of the Systems Planning and Design process, helping them to understand the complexity of the problems that self-represented litigants face.

In the second segment, the team structure remained the same, but the focus of planning turned to analysis as the teams developed functional descriptions of each of their areas of concern. The teams worked within these descriptive structures for insights about problems faced by self-represented litigants and began to describe ideas to deal with the problems.

The third segment was a structuring segment requiring examination of all the Functions uncovered in comparison with all the ideas that had been discovered or invented in the second segment - Information Structuring. For this segment, the teams were reconstituted into four “interaction” teams, each with members from all five of the original teams. The result of the interaction process and computer structuring was an “Information Structure” optimally suited to the tasks ahead of synthesizing system solutions.

Fourth segment teams were once again reconstituted into five teams, this time charged with using the Information Structure as a “road map” for developing final solutions. Each of the teams in this segment viewed its inventive tasks against the particular needs of one of the five case types most frequently seen in self-represented litigation: small claims, landlord-tenant, divorce, child support and domestic abuse.

In the fifth and sixth segments, the organization of the teams returned to the first model, with each team applying its breadth and depth knowledge to extending and refining concepts - Concept Development - (in the fifth segment) and constructing a communication document for the many ideas (sixth segment) - Communication.

Using this methodology, the project team during Phase Two developed the “Access to Justice” system described in the system design section of this site.