Blog #10: Jonathan Smith

Last week, our class was joined by Jonathan Smith, Assistant Professor of Practice and Director of the Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship Clinic at Washington University’s Law School. For the past few years, Professor Smith has also helped lawyers think about how to integrate law and design: Law can be a design question from the get-go, evidenced for example, in the context of drafting contracts. To illustrate this further, Professor Smith had the students review a landlord apartment lease template created by the Missouri Apartment Association and asked them to identify what features made the document less than user-friendly. He then led the class through an exercise to apply a human-centered approach to reimagine the design of the lease document and delivery experience. We sat down with Professor Smith and engaged in a brief reflection on the class (listen below).