The role of design patterns in the development and legal assessment of lawful technologies

Abstract

Novel technologies such as smart personal assistants integrate digital services into everyday life. These services use personal data to offer personalized services. While they are subject to special data protection regulations at the time of development, there are few guidelines describing the transition from legal requirements to implementation. To reduce risks, services depend on external legal assessments. With developers and legal experts often missing either legal or technical knowledge, the challenge lies in bridging this gap. We observe that design patterns support both developers and legal experts, and we present an approach in which design patterns are leveraged to provide twofold value for both developers and legal experts when dealing with novel technologies. We conducted a revelatory case study for smart personal assistants and scaffolded the case interpretation through cognitive fit theory. On the basis of the findings, we develop a theoretical model to explain and predict the twofold value of design patterns to develop and assess lawful technologies.

Impact Assessment as a Legal Design Pattern—A “Timeless Way” of Managing Future Risks?

“…How do wholesome solutions to urban planning relate to impact assessments for AI? Over time, design pattern thinking has been adopted in decreasingly material realms-first in software and human-computer interaction(See Gamma et al, 1993;Borchers, 2000;Dearden & Finlay, 2006;Mayvan et al, 2017) with some exploration on design patterns for legally compliant technologies (see Dickhaut et al, 2022;Hoffmann et al, 2015). More recently, the design pattern lens has been introduced to legal research (Koulu et al, 2021;Koulu & Pohle, 2024).…”

Electronic Markets on AI and standardization

“…The same applies when AI models are offered as products on information marketplaces (see Alt & Zimmermann, 2022) and certifications (e.g., privacy seals) provide orientation for buyers. More insight in this direction is included in the present special issue on trust in AI (Meske et al, 2022) with suggestions for standards to define the quality of explanations (Herm et al, 2022) , for applying legal standards such as GDPR (Dickhaut et al, 2022), for establishing the transparency about data quality standards (Michalke et al, 2022) as well as for standards to collect, process, and use personal data in networked settings (Koester et al, 2022). Finally, the output side denotes data that is being generated by AI-based systems (Thiebes et al 2021, p. 458).…”

“…As argued by the authors, this proves especially helpful for novel technologies like smart personal assistants where, due to their novelty, dedicated legal requirements often emerge only with a time lag and where legal problems, such as privacy breaches, could have been avoided. The usefulness of the proposed approach of lawful system development is shown in a case study based on realworld legal cases and a simulation of legal disputes from user complaints that had to be clarified in court (Dickhaut et al, 2022).…”