Happy returns: ideas brought back from situational crime prevention’s exploration of design against crime

I was a member of a small scouting-party sent out by Ron Clarke, founding father of Situational Crime Prevention, to explore the enormous and diverse territory of design and its potential to reduce crime. In this chapter of a festschrift book for Ron Clarke, I ask what has been brought back to the home discipline, and how it might challenge and change things there. The chapter draws largely on my own experience in working in the field of Design Against Crime with colleagues in a real art and design college, with real practitioners designing, making and testing things that work, are workable, have aesthetic appeal and are manufactured and deployed in the real world; but who are equally keen on theory, research and evaluation. Issues covered include the design process itself, and how it relates to, and can richly inform, the process of undertaking crime prevention; the importance of visualization; self-awareness of discourses; co-evolution and innovation; and dynamics, scripts and script clashes between users and abusers.

The exploration of the design world by SCP has not been a simple case of ‘grab the goodies and leave’. We are in an academic era where multidisciplinarity is favoured and the true merger of interdisciplinarity is considered a boon. Drawing on design means a real stirring of the multi-disciplinary melting-pot, because some of the issues and examples covered above have involved ideas from SCP being taken across to the design world and then brought back again in a developed, and design-articulate form, to crime prevention practitioners more generally. But whether Design Against Crime and Situational Crime Prevention should or could ever get as far as to produce a new interdiscipline is respectively for colleagues to opine and the future to reveal.

• Organisation
• http://www.amazon.com/Reasoning-Criminol...