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The CreaTech Glossary was created through a unique, multi-disciplinary, collaboration of UCL staff, students and industry partners.
Overview of the project
The CreaTech Glossary is a collection of key legal terms, which are of particular relevance to the creative sector. Designed to help those in the sector to recognise and protect their legal rights, the terms are defined in an accessible and practical way - providing commercial as well as legal insights.
Each entry was drafted by a multidisciplinary team of students, supported by industry mentors, at a one-day hackathon hosted by UCL Art Futures and Simmons & Simmons. Over 60 students from 18 departments at UCL signed up for the hackathon, with disciplines ranging from psychology and law to engineering and architecture.
A video of the hackathon is available on the Simmons & Simmons website.
Why the CreaTech Glossary was developed
The glossary was created in response to user research (gathered from multiple stakeholder workshops), which highlighted a lack of legal understanding as a key barrier to protecting creative intellectual property (IP). This risk is exacerbated in the creative technologies (CreaTech) space, where technology can increase the risk of an IP breach while making IP protection potentially more difficult.
The CreaTech Glossary is also an example of legal design in action, that is, a user-centric approach to making legal principles more accessible, understandable, and actionable.
Objectives of the project
The project had two core objectives. First, to support the creative community by sharing reliable, accessible and practical legal knowledge through the glossary itself. In meeting this goal, it was important that the glossary shared actionable information in a way that would equip its readers with the knowledge to recognise when a legal risk might arise and when steps should (and could) be taken to mitigate this.
Secondly, to give students a real insight into the value of thinking differently and working across disciplines. As many sectors increasingly focus on ‘innovation’, the project was an opportunity for students to explore how innovation is not simply a question of problem solving but problem identification. By seeing how a multidisciplinary approach can transform the way a problem is understood, the hackathon was designed to give students the tools and confidence to adopt this approach in their own work.
About the hackathon
The first draft of the glossary was created at a one-day hackathon held at the London offices of Simmons & Simmons.
Students were split into eight multi-disciplinary teams. Each team created three glossary entries by applying a custom eight-step methodology grounded in legal design and created especially for the project.
The methodology was critical to the success of the day for several reasons. Not only did it enable consistency of approach, it also provided a process by which the teams had to explore a given issue in an iterative manner. The methodology ensured that the term was considered from all perspectives in the team before they started drafting, allowing the team to truly understand the impact of a given subject, not just its technical definition. In doing so, the methodology showed the teams how process can be a vital tool in innovation, providing confidence to those who may not have considered themselves ‘creative’.
Terms were allocated to each team and one term was drafted in a single round. Teams would complete the methodology blueprint in each session, supported by industry experts. Before and after each session, the team would rank their understanding of the term to track how the exercise had changed their perspective of their own understanding.
The day ended with drinks and networking opportunities to help the students cement their new connections. A detailed overview of the planning of the hackathon and a toolkit of resources to run your own event is available.
Working with industry partners
Industry partners were central to the success of the hackathon. The event was co-designed with our UCL Art Futures law firm partner, Simmons & Simmons. On the day, mentors from Simmons & Simmons as well as Simmons’ clients and peers from industry partners supported the student teams in exploring each term and drafting the glossary entry.
“The hackathon was an opportunity for students to think critically about their own disciplines and traditional ways of working. It showed how different perspectives can fundamentally change how we understand a problem and, as a result, design solutions.