To the extent that internet cures are not online health misinformation, they resist the logic of intervention as problem-solving precisely because they provide resolution to problems that otherwise remain indeterminate: digital inscription of miracle cures as record-making and record-keeping, transnational networked sociality that emerges out of the increasingly datafied environment of executable text, the reconfiguration of downtime into connectedness and belonging, and the creation of an alternative miraculous space for therapy as a playful activity. The crowdsourcing of miracle cures happened organically via social media as an intermediary for matching community needs with community capacity; that the longevity of these online groups enables post hoc creation of datasets that can be explored computationally, that the dynamic knowledge-making processes that unfold on these groups become fully open to view thanks to platform affordances – are secondary to the pre-digital social dynamics that drove these practices forward. These secondary utilities, however, came to solidify and legitimize these practices in an ecology of datafied behaviour; in this process, these utilities also transformed the expectation around what it means to engage with miracle cures. If seeking herbal cures for cancer, for example, used to mean coming to a lương y (‘doctor of good conscience’) for advice, or to a herbal store to purchase thuốc gia truyền recipes (‘family transmission’ recipes) and coming away with instructions that are based on socially sanctioned expertise, increasingly people are taking to social media to work out the details of these bodies of knowledge both in response to emergent health concerns and to enact the work of care. That it became acceptable and even desirable to carry out this kind of work in such a digital context is a by-product of the historical continuation of practices that never quite ceased to exist in the first place – and also of emerging forms of sociality as compositions of meaning via digital platform affordances.

Miracle cures proliferate at the digital edge in ways that are very important to their survival: in languages that skirt the technical capabilities and political will of regimes of automated platform content moderation, as esoteric discourse that defies easy categorization, in formats that are prioritized for the imperative of platform profit, and at a temporality constantly recalibrated to accommodate self-time/ eigenzeit.

What kind of time do we experience when we wait? When we wait for someone to turn up to a video call, time feels like an interlude; when we wait for our Facebook News Feed to load, time feels like a clot in our throat as the buffering icon keeps on spinning. In waiting, we realize that there is a multitude to temporalities: time can be standardized so people can be in the same place at the same time, but time also dwells inside each of us – in the consciousness of our finite lifetime and in the rhythms of our body. Technology has been said to accelerate time and contract duration (Hassan, 2011; Wajcman, 2015); what, then, of waiting with technology? Technology has not made waiting redundant, but it seems to have transformed waiting substantially. When we reach for our phone as we wait, with or without a direction, waiting is given shape outside of our own body. When we wait on or with our phone, however, waiting re-emerges as viscerally within.

Liveness captures some of these entangled dynamics of waiting in the presence of technology. Certain temporal arrangements are to be made for liveness to be enacted: someone to ‘go live’, someone to ‘watch live’, something to be happening ‘live’, some technologies to faithfully carry out ‘the live’. Radio is thought of as a live medium (Vianello, 1985), broadcast television is live insofar as it competes with the new viewing platforms and business models such as Netflix and Hulu (van Es, 2017), ‘digital liveness’ has been understood as ‘our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims they make on us’ (Auslander, 2012, p 10). Liveness temporality is multiple and contingent on its medium; the ‘paradox of liveness’ lies in its apparent constructedness and its seeming claim to provide direct access to the event relayed (van Es, 2017). There is a similar paradox to the temporality of waiting: waiting is an enactment of particular bodily and extra-bodily temporalities, but waiting is also time temporalizing through the body.

In the sections that follow, I explore what it means when people engage in liveness as a way to overcome waiting – to recalibrate downtime. I begin by outlining the paradox of liveness as algorithmic and liveness as lived by reviewing current disparate literatures.

We are entering into a brave new world of quantum technologies. This quantum impetus on society will also cause a system reformation in the legal arena. Here, we dissect and analyze what this quantum leap of the legal sphere contains. Furthermore, we present a pragmatic road map to find a path through an uncharted legal design landscape toward a prosperous quantum future.

This chapter focuses on visualising the law, in the form of comics, as a specific way to understand the realm of legal design. Focusing on the case study of Lawtoons, we detail the existing definitional inconsistencies of legal design and advocate for clarity in appreciating the purview of this emerging discipline. The legal design community must have, at its very core, the ability to visualise law to make law available at scale. We also briefly lay the conceptual foundations of visualisation in law and argue that graphics and storytelling are an important way to promote dignity in legal awareness and education.

This book is an introduction to the new field of legal design and a primer on both the application and theory of legal design that has developed so far in a decade of exploration and experimentation. We have assembled case studies of pioneering efforts from around the world, collected examples of methods and perspectives just now coming into focus, and offer a handful of proscriptions for the future. Bookending those three subject areas are both individual and collective articulations of these editors’ frames of reference and influence in our work together—dignity, law, and radical imagination. Our collective frame for this volume is relentlessly optimistic. We believe that the new field of legal design provides a promising intervention for challenging the harmful systems, structures, methodologies and outcomes that currently define legal systems, and designing systems that actually embody and effectuate the full promise of the rule of law – a just, peaceful, and equitable world for everyone.

In this chapter, we introduce the NuLawLab’s pedagogical activities and how dignity has played out in the classroom and experiential learning as a method, core value, and outcome. This chapter details the role of the laboratory model in making the connection between real-world problems and legal education, and the NuLawLab’s application of that concept, which focuses on actively and explicitly making connections among scholarship, community projects, and classrooms. To further our work in teaching legal design, we strive to keep our teaching strategies straightforward and accessible, making legal design available to a broader range of students. We’re determined to explore every avenue to expand legal design’s reach and integration into legal education. We aim to collaborate across institutions to elevate the entire field and establish a more innovative legal design community. These goals align with our commitment to fostering a more inclusive, diverse, and inventive legal design community that empowers students to address the intricate challenges of the legal system.

The Open Law Lab blog was one of the first concerted efforts to articulate the promise for design in the legal space. This chapter details the work of legal design pioneer Margaret Hagan, with a particular emphasis on the challenges legal design academics face in securing respect for design methods from faculty of US law schools. It proposes that, by combining pedagogical innovation with rigorous evaluation of law and design student learning outcomes, legal design can claim its place at the forefront of academic innovation.

Movement lawyers deploy law strategically to change culture, systems, and power. We work with community organizers to weave litigation, education, media, policy, and protest into coordinated campaigns, and together we transcend the limitations of what can be achieved in the courts. Guided by values of dignity, collectivity, and creativity, this unique theory of change calls on the lawyer to be innovative and use law strategically as one of many tools to build the power of marginalized people to win change. Thus, we see legal design as a versatile and valuable tactic that has the potential to build power when combined with community organizing. To make this case, we share our experiences deploying legal design in collaboration with organized communities in Miami and how we used this tool to increase the dignity of the communities we work with, create political space to advance progressive demands, and allow for cross-pollination across disciplines and sectors to arrive at strategic and long-term solutions. We also share some of our wisdom and reflections on the challenges and limitations of using legal design to build people power and contextualize this tool among a range of others.

Prologue: Embodying the digital

Our bodily activities are increasingly directly connected to the use of technological devices, as we carry our laptops, phones, and other electronic items throughout the day: we rely on these devices to communicate, socialize, stay productive, and, as we will see in the following chapters, enact miracles. We no longer use digital technologies simply to communicate, as the previous section has dissected; as we engage with these technologies beyond textual modes, our bodily performance in the digital milieu becomes richly entwined in the dynamic technological affordances that are already embedded in distinct cultural contexts and collective habits. What does it mean to perform digital miracles? What are the sociotechnical conditions that make digital miracles possible?

The ease with which digital images can be produced with digital devices has transformed the social mode of photography and videography from a fixed position of being gazed at and consumed to a dynamic visual practice that is intended to be shared, discussed, and revisited. This transformation not only changes the language of vernacular image-making, but also the very conditions of possibility of creative, spiritual, and miraculous pursuits. Because taking photos and videos has become routine and mundane practice thanks to increasingly ubiquitous availability of devices and internet access, it is to the level of the everyday that we should now turn our attention. In this section, we will interrogate the conditions of possibility for living with digital miracles through a complex digital mode of engagement: that of platform livestreaming.

This chapter offers insights, stories, reflections, and practical examples of hope amid turbulent times. Given the constant need to reimagine our social-legal systems and teach new legal education strategies, we must codesign solutions with movement leaders and other advocates working to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system. As we seek to reimagine our world within the framework of health, equity, healing, human rights, and transformative justice, we must find new methods to develop students’ imaginations and build strategies to reimagine our social-legal systems in educational institutions. By codesigning solutions with movement leaders and other advocates, we can work to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system and beyond.

Prologue: Miracles before the digital

Miracle cures differ greatly across time and context. What all miracle cures share, however, is their being unusual and unexpected from the perspective of empirical scientific knowledge – where an effect is said to have happened despite the absence of an acceptable cause. The miracle cure is both an in vivo concept in vernacular language and a theoretical category that travels far beyond their situated meanings. In Vietnam, the notion of the miracle cure (thần dược) is historically tied not to a Christian divine intervention tradition, but rather to the miraculous healing effects of much of the everyday garden and jungle herbs and plants. By recasting miracle cures as non-biomedical modalities, whose processes of producing, propagating, and living are historical and ongoing, we can begin to discern the limits of the misinformation paradigm and interrogate these modalities as both mediated and material.