Michalina Fidos, Nina Toivonen, and Mari Suoheimo
Participatory knowledge production lies at the heart of systemic design. It has also increasingly been adopted in legal and legislative design. Yet previous research has identified that the ways in which marginalised groups are subjectified within participatory projects—such as “vulnerable”, “reckless” or “irrational”—may inadvertently reinforce the very marginalization such initiatives seek to address. These forms of subjectification shape the preconditions for knowledge production, including problem framing, data collection and analysis, as well as stakeholder engagement. Consequently, well-intentioned design interventions risk contributing to the epistemic othering of marginalised groups and therefore reproducing existing injustices.
This paper asks: how could such epistemic othering be addressed in legal design? We explore this question through two visual analytical tools in the context of an ongoing project on tech-driven over-indebtedness among young adults in Finland, a group frequently positioned as marginalised or vulnerable both in public, legal and policy discourses. The first tool, Knowledge Kaleidoscope, is a visual literature review method to support reflexive analysis of the subjectification of stakeholders in a project. It helps make visible the narratives around stakeholders in different types of data sources that inform a project, including statistics, research, legislation or media articles
The second tool, Power Compass, helps further identify and analyse how those narratives might influence the project’s problem framing, data gathering and other epistemic choices, as well as helps navigate potential risks of epistemic othering during stakeholder engagement activities.
This exploratory self-application provides an initial proof of concept for using the tools to visually analyse relationships between different knowledge domains. It also examines how their narratives construct and reconstruct subject profiles, contributing to epistemic othering. The findings suggest that the tools may help raise awareness of the narratives that guide or dominate a particular design setting, while also supporting the exploration of alternative framings and forms of subjectification.
Keywords: Epistemic justice, legal design, design for policy, systemic design, visual tools, Knowledge Kaleidoscope, Power Compass, individual over-indebtedness.