Designing Products Against Crime

Design against crime (DAC) uses processes and products of design to reduce crime and promote community safety through practice-led research. This invited chapter, for the first international academic handbook of crime prevention, culminates two decades of involvement in DAC.

Historically, DAC focused on built environments, but from mid-80s I helped broaden the agenda, first by researching ‘crime-free cars’. In 1998 I commissioned/guided research for the government’s Crime Reduction Programme, establishing a route for involving design researchers, Design Council and RSA, covering product and environmental design. There, and in this chapter, I applied the rigorous approaches I had developed to integrate general crime prevention: specifying causes of crime and preventive interventions (Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity); capturing good practice knowledge to facilitate replication/innovation in new contexts (5Is process); and horizon-scanning (Misdeeds and Security framework for identifying crime risks/preventive opportunities in scientific/technological innovations).

Novel developments in my work described in the paper include ‘troublesome tradeoffs’ between a product’s crime resistance and wider fitness; reconciling designers’ creativity with conceptual clarity and clear rationale of ‘problem, cause, intervention’; coping with changing crime risks and adaptive offenders by adopting ‘arms-race’ perspectives, empowering designers to out-innovate criminals; learning to run/avoid arms races from analogous ‘evolutionary struggles’ including military, predator/prey, bacteria/antibiotics.

The ideas in this paper were adopted widely e.g. through Project MARC (EU-funded work on ‘crime-proofing’ of products where I led expert workshops culminating in refereed journal article with Sidebottom (2007)), participation in CEN (EU Standards) expert group, and current work in CDAC on bike parking security. Invited presentations have included to the International Crime Science Network, US Problem-Oriented Policing Conference, European Forum on Urban Security and UK Designing Out Crime Association.

Paul Ekblom

Research Interests

Theory, development, implementation & evaluation of Design Against Crime.

Definitions & conceptual frameworks for knowledge transfer of good practice in crime prevention.

Horizon scanning, incl. crime risk/ impact assessment.

Evolution, arms races, complexity & simulation applied to crime.

Current Research

1.Principal Investigator, AHRC-funded project, with JDI/UCL, to design, implement and evaluate range of security products intended to reduce theft of customers' bags in bars. Based on this, developing concepts and language for describing/specifying security and security weaknesses in designed products, systems and environments.

2. Co-investigator, AHRC-funded project to develop more secure bike parking, including through guidance and standards. Based on my part of this work, recently completed, www.bikeoff.org/2009/01/05/final-report-wpa2-of-bike-off-2/ developing advanced frameworks for supporting crime risk analysis leading to design guidance. Currently discussing development of these frameworks in built environment and anti-terrorist contexts.

3. Currently writing book to elaborate key concepts, details and applications of 5Is framework, an advanced process model for crime prevention, and used in capture, synthesis and retrieval of good practice knowledge, supporting intelligenf replication and innovation. See www.designagainstcrime.com/web/crimeframeworks. Related to this, involved as partner in EU-funded project Beccaria on developing crime prevention training in EU and a range of informal national/international collaborations on knowledge management.

5. Developing new ways of thinking about Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design based on a tighter conceptual/theoretical framework than currently exists.

6. Investigating scope for using graphic/communications design to represent complexity in policy/practice systems such as, but not confined to, crime prevention.