Ms Kate Goodwin1, Mr Ryley Lawson1, Ms Nadia Morales2
1Paper Giant, Melbourne, Australia, 2Inner Melbourne Community Legal, North Melbourne, Australia
Victorian international students are vulnerable to a range of legal issues involving where they live, work and study, but most don’t know where to turn for support, and fear reporting issues because of perceived impacts to their visa arrangements. Additionally, international students are not usually eligible for Legal Aid assistance and may have limited resources to otherwise obtain legal advice.
Recognising this, Inner Melbourne Community Legal (IMCL) – a not-for-profit community legal centre – worked with the Victorian State Government and strategic design consultancy Paper Giant to develop a student-centred, self-guided, multi-lingual community legal education (CLE) tool to provide international students with practical legal knowledge and better pathways for obtaining legal support.
A series of user-centred research and design activities were undertaken including workshops where we asked international students to share their stories of hardship and explored ideas for sharing and accessing “just-in-time” legal advice and support through their social networks. Close consultation was also undertaken with organisations supporting international students including ISANA, CISA, the Study Melbourne Student Centre and Meld Magazine to understand existing support structures and how the online tool might fit within or add to these support mechanisms.
This presentation will demonstrate how we used human-centred design methods to build a solution ‘for the right reasons and in the right way’ to address international students’ legal support needs. Particular attention will be paid to the importance of involving international students at every step of the end-to-end research, design and evaluation process, ensuring their needs, goals and motivations are sensitively considered in solution development.
Biography:
Kate Goodwin has over 14 years’ experience designing services for the justice sector, government, not-for-profits, financial and insurance services, and small business. She collaborates with organisations to apply research insights and strategic design thinking to inform product and service development and implementation. She is the Experience Design and Strategy Lead at Paper Giant, a strategic design consultancy based in Melbourne who work closely with the community legal sector, government, not-for-profits, and private enterprise.
Nadia Morales is a lawyer with almost 20 years of experience in the access to justice sector domestically and internationally in a variety of legal practice and project management roles. Nadia currently manages Inner Melbourne Community Legal’s communications and community legal education work with a focus on social justice and systemic legal reform projects. She is also a producer/presenter on Melbourne’s 3CR Radio’s Done By Law program, a platform for community lawyers to critically analyse how the law affects marginalised and disadvantaged community members and give voice to those who often go unheard.