Can images and ideograms help make complex human rights law comprehensible?

The TEDxAmsterdam Award draws attention, and offers support, to local idea-makers. The 2015 Award winner will be announced soon, but for now, the proposals have been narrowed down to three nominees. Shayne Smart, one of the finalists, asks a simple question: Can images and ideograms help make complex human rights law (in particular the Geneva Conventions) comprehensible? In this interview, we ask him more about his big idea.

The question that you’ve put forward to the TEDxAmsterdam Award — can images and ideograms help make complex human rights law (in particular the Geneva Conventions) comprehensible — seems deceptively simple. Tell us about the core of the problem that you’re trying to solve.

There is a disconnect between states, human rights law, and justice.

We see human rights abuses on the news and we’re morally against them, but we have no understanding of the laws being broken. States have an obligation to educate their citizens in human rights, but don’t. Leaders act with impunity and claim plausible deniability. Citizens are not aware of their rights and need lawyers to just to find that the law is being broken!

We need to close the gap, so civilians can understand law and meaningfully demand justice.

Information about the Geneva Conventions is freely available though, right? What prevents ordinary citizens from being informed?

The texts of all human rights law are freely available on the internet and in printed form, however not in all languages. Beyond language, the time and effort to become familiar with just The Geneva Conventions requires reading 200 pages written in a legal style, creating an education barrier to understanding. To find one article without being familiar with the conventions takes several hours. The final barrier is for an individual to share the law globally. To share an article as text doesn’t fit in a tweet and sharing is limited to the language chosen. Images overcome these barriers.

What do you think images and ideograms add to the information about the Geneva Conventions that words are unable to do?

The speed of comprehension of pictures is faster than reading and bypasses our mental filters. Images stir emotions and once seen, can’t be ‘unseen’. With visuals showing humans and actions, there is no linguistic or literacy barrier to understanding.

Consider the test image below. This shows the law in an active case being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Ahmad Al Faqi Mahdi for attacking historic monuments and buildings dedicated to religion. The same law covers the recent bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières run hospital in Afghanistan by the USA military.

The visual of the article is quick to understand, compared with reading The Rome Statute and finding Article 8.2.b.ix:

“8 (2)For the purpose of this Statute, “war crimes” means: (b) Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts: (ix) Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not military objectives;”

What are the challenges of turning these concepts into image form?

Human rights law is divided into articles. The sheer volume of articles (300+ unique articles in The Geneva Conventions) requires multiple design iterations to harmonize the visual language across all articles.

The articles are written in ‘legalese’ rather than normal spoken language. It’s been hard work for designers to create concepts straight from this language. For visualizing the next body of law, I’d simplify the article text first.

Developing visual concepts to represent out-of-the ordinary events requires multiple attempts, which we addressed by having several designers making different versions of each article.

We also need to test for culture differences. For example, there is cultural variation in understanding negation: the concept of ‘No’ can be represented by a circle with a dissecting line at an angle, or as a cross rotated by 45 degrees, or as a flat palm facing the viewer (stop). The cross at 45 degrees is the most widely understood to mean ‘No’.

Do you see each of these pictures as standalone iconography and signage, or are they meant to also be combined to form larger points or narratives, like in a graphic novel, for example?

Each article is a standalone picture. For some articles, it is easier to show a 2 or 3 panel story, within the same canvas space. In educating using the articles, it makes sense to learn them in sets, each set dealing with a single theme, e.g. providing food, hygiene, and medication to prisoners of war.

NGOs such as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Amnesty International have already produced both graphic novels and animations, that tell both high-level intent and individual stories of human rights. These really draw you into empathy with the protagonists and encourage you to support or donate, but they don’t always enable us to identify which law is being broken and pursue justice.

You’ve already been working on materializing these articles into images, and as a team, you’ve got concepts for around 2/3 of the conventions thus far. Once it’s complete, what do you see as the ideal future for them? How might they be used and how would you distribute them?

The ideal future is as a simple reference for people in conflict locations to know their rights and that the world agreed to those rights — they are not alone. Then, for civilians, NGOs, and journalists to use the images to communicate human rights abuses, thereby raising popular support to demand justice from states or for states to take action against other states.

The use cases so far are for protest signs in civilian action, as ready-made images for use by news services, on social media, and as a deck of flash-cards for refugees to understand what abuses are occurring in the area of conflict. Since we’re releasing the images under Creative Commons licensing, people will be able to come up with their own ideas!

Once complete, we’ll release them as a free downloadable web resource, on existing platforms like The Noun Project and in ready-made format for news infographics teams. We’ll seed them into human rights demonstrations through contacting organizers and into social media discussion relating to specific abuses.

When it launches, the crowdfunding campaign will offer printed books as rewards, but I won’t know the demand for books until launch. Maybe a waterproof book offer will be useful for remote locations. Print is very much test-and-see.

After the Geneva Conventions, we’ll expand into the next sets of human rights laws — The Rome Statute, The International Bill of Rights for Women, and The Rights of the Child.

Originally published at tedx.amsterdam on November 22, 2015.