Profit from Paranoia: Design against ‘Paranoid’ Products

Innovation is a risky business. Trying to innovate products to empower the individual against street crime, or to create designs for public space that can anticipate terrorist intentions, raise many design issues as well as what Prof. Ekblom (2005) defines as ‘troublesome tradeoffs.’1 These involve safety concerns versus address to maintaining personal freedoms. This paper will review specific troublesome tradeoffs between sustainable design goals when trying to effectively design against disaster. It will consider how and whether the design against crime model of the research and design process can and should embrace issues posed by terrorism, and whether it can be adapted to effectively do so. Discussion on this subject will occur by reviewing the ‘Conjunction of Terrorist Opportunity’ framework (Roach et al. 2005) and considering how the impact of acknowledging a potential ‘terrorist’ threat by the designer may have different consequences to other forms of crime risk problem analysis. In particular the paper will discuss why design against terrorism, delivered without appropriate forethought, could be in danger of becoming equivalent of what Martin Innes (2004) calls a ‘signal crime’, over-fortified in terms of a security aesthetic or problem response, and in our view meriting the description ‘paranoid’ product.

• http://www.grippaclip.com/publications/a...
• https://eadresearch.org/conferences/