The experience of legal certainty in encounters with SKAT

MindLab used artworks to encourage people to put their experience of legal certainty into words. This provided SKAT with information that was new to it.

The public’s experience of legal certainty is given high priority in the activities of the Ministry of Taxation. SKAT has therefore continuously asked people about their experience of legal certainty using questionnaire surveys. When SKAT compares the responses from the public regarding the various issues it encounters many inconsistencies, as well as numerous “don’t know” responses. This has prompted SKAT to consider whether the measurements reflect people’s actual experience of legal certainty. MindLab was therefore given the job of using novel methods to qualify the Ministry of Taxation’s understanding of people’s experience of legal certainty. One of the approaches involved using three artworks as a starting point for discussions and thoughts regarding the experiences of a selected group of citizens in their dealings with SKAT.

”We’re in safe hands. We get star treatment. And yet something sinister’s going on.”

Citizen comment at the meeting with SKAT

MindLab involved:

• An art curator who is an expert at using art in development work
• 3 artists
• 12 members of the public

Principal results

• New information. The artwork gave the members of the public the opportunity to put into words a concept that might otherwise seem abstract and difficult to connect with their own lives.

• Research, development and branding in a single step. The method used made SKAT better informed about the experiences of the public, while in turn the members of the public gained a new perspective on their experience of SKAT as an institution.

• An internal debate took place among SKAT’s employees regarding the experience of legal certainty, and this generated an improved understanding of the public’s point of view. One of the things the artworks are being used for is to train people in serving the public or having contact with them, as well as other strategic work.

What MindLab did

MindLab established a collaboration with three young artists who each presented their suggestions regarding the concept of the experience of legal certainty. Once the three artworks were ready, we invited members of the public who had been selected to be representative of a variety of disciplines, ages and sexes to take part in a workshop. Here they were asked to relate their own experiences of legal certainty in the context of their encounter with the artworks. The citizens were not supposed to critique the works, but to express their own observations and to describe the experiences, prejudices and thoughts that the artworks prompted in their minds. Their inputs were compiled into a report and presented to the Ministry of Taxation’s management board, which the study thereby provided with a better basis for organizing and applying the measurements of people’s experience of legal certainty.

”The three works can be regarded as a prism through which we are suddenly able to see or put into words what we might have felt or thought but could not really articulate.”

Mette Sandbye, art critic from the publication Erfaringer med kunst som metode (‘Experiences using art as a method’).

See the three works in question: