Is ‘Nudge’ as Good as ‘We Think’ in Designing Against Crime? Contrasting Paternalistic and Fraternalistic Approaches to Design for Behaviour Change

This chapter describes a collaborative design-led approach to behaviour change developed in the context of design against crime. It compares this collaborative ‘we think’ way of working to that of ‘nudge’ design and argues that the participatory design-led approach delivers a ‘fraternal’ rather than ‘paternal’ strategy for behaviour change that is transformative in its means as well as its ends. We outline situational crime prevention (SCP) and other approaches to modifying behaviour to explain how socially responsive design against crime draws upon SCP as well as a participatory, asset-oriented design approach to deliver interventions that reduce opportunities for crime. We introduce case studies from the Design Against Crime Research Centre (Bikeoff and ATM Art Mats) to draw attention to two examples of social design that provide exceptions to the idea (summarized by Niedderer et al. 2014) that designers adopt anecdotal approaches rather than meticulous analysis. Finally, we suggest that ‘bottom-up’ participatory strategies associated with socially responsive design may deliver more democratic social transformations, than behaviour change ‘nudges’.