Machine Law for Human Life

Machine Law for Human Life: Stress Testing Rights and Public Services

What if laws could be run, not just read? Life events like divorce, job loss, or falling into debt are stress tests — for people and for our legal system.

In this project, we explore how legal texts can be turned into reliable, understandable, and testable digital services. Building on the concept of machine-readable law, we apply it to key life events when citizens rely on public services the most.

Using open-source tools and public code libraries, we prototype how rules can be modeled, simulated, and translated into user-facing tools — always anchored in real stories, not just policy. This is not about AI interpreting law, but about making the state intelligible, programmable, and just.

Designers, technologists, policymakers, and citizens are invited to engage with a growing “codebase of the state” and explore how legal logic could serve as infrastructure for care, trust, and dignity. This is a speculative, hopeful prototype of what government could be — if designed from the citizen outwards, and from reality in.

Programme

When you think of digital government, you think of portals, forms, and helpdesks. But beneath that surface lies a hidden machinery: thousands of rules, their interactions, and the digital systems that run them — shaping lives in ways no one fully sees.

Here’s the paradox: while design celebrates being human-centered, government cannot be. By law, it is law-bound and organization-centered. As it should be — yet the effect is a system that no citizen, and no civil servant, can truly oversee.

In this 90-minute cinema experience, you follow Linda, a character built from real stories. Step by step, her journey reveals why government often feels like a black box — especially in life’s stressful moments — and why true human-centeredness is structurally out of reach.

We then open the curtain: exposing the root causes and presenting a possible way forward with machine-readable law — rules that can be read by humans, run by computers, and navigated by everyone.

With cinematic storytelling and live demonstrations, you’ll see how design can reveal the invisible and reimagine digital government for human life.

Seats are limited — join us to discover what usually remains hidden.

Please note: this is the Wednesday Session, there is also a session on Friday

English language - Dutch context