Rights in the Courts

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Rights in the Courts, Potion's interactive exhibit for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, invites visitors to enter a discourse on landmark human rights cases that went before the Supreme Court of Canada.

After eleven years in development, the highly anticipated Museum opened its doors to the public in September 2014. The building, designed by Antoine Predock, houses 47,000 square feet of all new exhibitions, designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates. In the spirit of engaging the world’s citizens in the human rights issues of our time, all of the exhibits are interactive or immersive. Potion created Rights in the Courts in collaboration with content and design partner Bruce Mau Design and with RAA.

Credits

  • Potion
    UX Design
    Software Development
  • Ralph Appelbaum Associates
    Exhibition Design
  • Bruce Mau Design
    Content and Visual Design

In Rights in the Courts, three overhead screens play documentary-style videos about each of the featured Supreme Court cases, which vary in subject from treaty rights to bullying in schools. Visitors adjudicate on the primary legal question at stake, responding with a simple “yes” or “no” using one of the fifteen touchscreens that form the circle below. The software immediately tallies and displays the votes for that session back to the visitors, and compares them to the cumulative votes of previous museum-goers and to the final Supreme Court decision.

The intentional simplicity of the interaction design stands in contrast to the content, which is anything but simple. The storylines, presented only once and in linear fashion, require users to quickly process information that will likely challenge their sense of reason, justice, ethics, morality, and empathy.

 

In Rights in the Courts, three overhead screens play documentary-style videos about each of the featured Supreme Court cases, which vary in subject from treaty rights to bullying in schools. Visitors adjudicate on the primary legal question at stake, responding with a simple “yes” or “no” using one of the fifteen touchscreens that form the circle below. The software immediately tallies and displays the votes for that session back to the visitors, and compares them to the cumulative votes of previous museum-goers and to the final Supreme Court decision.

The intentional simplicity of the interaction design stands in contrast to the content, which is anything but simple. The storylines, presented only once and in linear fashion, require users to quickly process information that will likely challenge their sense of reason, justice, ethics, morality, and empathy.

 

Credits

  • Potion
    UX Design
    Software Development
  • Ralph Appelbaum Associates
    Exhibition Design
  • Bruce Mau Design
    Content and Visual Design