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.