LSNC’s original Unlawful Detainer diagram — outlining the steps of an eviction process.
Annotations to the Unlawful Detainer diagram made collectively in class.
Major cities attract a lot of attention in California’s housing crisis, but people in rural areas are also threatened by displacement. Free legal services exist to help rural tenants navigate the complexities of rental housing and evictions — however, these resources are often thinly spread over wide geographic areas. Legal misinformation passed between neighbors and friends can cause tenants to unknowingly make mistakes that result in unnecessary indefensible evictions, credit report penalties, and added difficulties in finding a new place to live.
Approachable legal information can minimize these impacts. This project, in collaboration with Shah’ada Shaban at Legal Services of Northern California, seeks to make community legal education accessible for tenants in rural Northern California. By presenting accurate legal information in ways that are clear, friendly, and easily shareable, this project helps empower renters to fight for their homes and stay in their communities.
I integrated this project into curriculum of DES 159: Design for Understanding, wherein students work to make complex information accessible through information design. In this one-week skill-building exercise, students were asked to rapidly reimagine a document detailing the eviction process: the Tenant’s Unlawful Detainer diagram. Students engaged Shah’ada from LSNC in class, and were given the chance to ask about the context and constraints of the document in situ.
Working individually, students then produced preliminary concepts for how the document could be more user-friendly (shown here). I successfully applied for funding from the UC Placemaking Initiative and compensated a group of DES 159 students to continue their work on this project beyond the term.
UC Placemaking Initiative Grant Recipient
Daisy Jimenez
Olivia Kotlarek
Jiwon Choi
John Mahmood
Ana Petraglia
One-week rapid prototype by Daisy Jimenez.
One-week rapid prototype by Ana Petraglia.