Bike Off 2 – Catalysing Anti Theft Bike, Bike Parking and Information Design for the 21st Century

Project Bikeoff's Design for the 21st Century programme, followed earlier research and development work on preventing bike theft by colleagues at the Design Against Crime Research Centre, my own work over 15 years in developing conceptual frameworks for theoretical and practice knowledge in crime prevention, and work on crime pattern analysis and evaluation techniques for situational crime prevention at the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science.

Bikeoff aimed to draw on this experience to develop and build capacity among designers to undertake innovative and focused work in design against crime, which could generalise from bike parking to other crimes/fields of design. Work Package A2 sought to apply my Conjunction of Criminal Opportunity framework (a criminological map of the immediate causes of crime and preventive interventions in those causes) to guide the thinking of designers and organise existing knowledge and experience of secure bike parking facilities. During the collaboration with designers CCO significantly evolved e.g. to match the original interest in 'abusers' to the designer's central interest in 'users', and to become more dynamic through the concept of the 'scripts' of users in parking bikes securely, and of abusers in seeking to steal them, culminating in the new and fundamental concept of 'script clashes' (e.g. surveil v conceal, pursue v escape). These clashes sharply focus the designers' task: it is their job to shape products, environments and services to tip the balance to favour users.

Beyond this a particular procedure was developed, of wide application, to use the amended CCO to 1) systematically analyse the crime risks to and from a given product, and then 2) guide designers to reduce/mitigate the risks whilst maximising design freedom.

Paul Ekblom

Research Interests

Designing products, places and systems against crime, disorder, drug abuse and terrorism, situational crime prevention, conceptual frameworks for integrating crime science, managing crime prevention knowledge and improving practice, evaluation methods, crime, evolution, complexity and design, crime futures. 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.

I became Professor and Associate Director of the DAC Centre in June 2005, and co-manage the Centre. I will be delivering academic papers and publications aimed at driving forward the DAC Research Agenda both at home and abroad. One of the major roles I have concerns making and improving links that will establish new research collaborations for the development of externally funded projects. These links in the fields of crime science, criminology and design will initially focus on UCL (the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science (where I am currently an Associate and regularly give lectures on Masters courses), Huddersfield and Salford Universities (where I am also Visiting Professor); Loughborough, Cambridge, LSE and KCL. I am a member of academic networks including the EPSRC-funded SERVE and International Crime Science Network; and have contacts in a range of EU funding and potential collaborating institutions in academia, European Commission and national governments. I am an established figure in the worlds of police and crime prevention training, research, knowledge management and advanced practice and am well-placed to develop funding, collaboration and practical research opportunities there (as well as applying this experience to DAC).