Kent Law School’s Professor Amanda Perry-Kessaris was recently elected Fellow of the Design Research Society in recognition of her pioneering work on the application of design-based methods to enhance legal research, education and practice.
Her contributions to design in legal research include Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode (2021), supported by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, which was the first ever exploration of how design research can enhance legal research; and a series of events in which design research methods were used to prompt and facilitate others to use model-making, curated objects, and exhibition to enhance their research.
Her contributions to design in legal education include Design in Legal Education (2022) co-edited with Emily Allbon, which was the first volume exploring the contribution that design knowledge and techniques can make to legal education; and the integration of design knowledge and techniques into the Research Methods in Law module that is compulsory to all postgraduate research students at Kent Law School.
Her contributions to design in legal practice include a series of collaborations with non-government actors in Europe and India to show how prototyping might support participatory research around the sensitive topic of hate crime; and an on-going collaboration with civil society actors to explore how designed immersive inter-species council experiences might activate public imagination in preparation for a possible citizens assembly for the future of Cyprus.
You can find out more about Amanda’s work via her blog, Approaching Law and her video archive, and by listening to this episode of the Legal Design Podcast. Most of her academic publications are freely available via SSRN.