The idea of Designing Out Crime can be a great way to make UK products, services and spaces less vulnerable to crime and set them apart in an increasingly difficult marketplace. Designers from outside the UK have also realised the potential they have to help people feel less vulnerable to crime by securing everyday products and working with technologists and materials experts to create innovative solutions to a variety of crime problems.
Inspiration from the US
Come 12.30 in the Design Council offices our minds turn to lunch. And if we’ve brought in our own there’s nothing that can spoil the rest of the day more effectively than finding someone has stolen your lunch from the fridge.
Design agency the. felt the same way and came up with a way to stop lunch theft that depends on potential lunch thieves having delicate stomachs. Sandwich bags are incrusted in green print that looks like mold.
Their designer inclination to sketch on empty surfaces mixed with their desire to remain law abiding got the. thinking again about designing out crime. With their Walls Notebook any wannabe graffiti artists can get 80 clean New York City scenes to doodle on. ‘You’ll be one step closer to being the graffiti artist you’ve always wanted to be ... minus the jail time,’ says the. designer and co-founder Sherwood Forlee.
When they wanted a way to protect their new laptop designers Manila Mac took inspiration from the Apple Macbook Air adverts which show the latest thin laptop being taken out of a manila document folder. The design duo has created a padded secure laptop case that looks just like an ordinary document folder, so whoever’s carrying it doesn’t appear to have anything more valuable than a sheaf of paper.
From Australia
In 2006, there were 261, 895 reported incidents of unlawful entry and burglary in Australia. As she conducted research into why burglary was such a big problem in Australia, Jenny Loqvist, a design student at Griffith University, identified that: 'there are many cases where the thief used a wheelie bin to access a house through balconies, open windos etc.' Often wheelie bins are stored next to the house or outside the garage so they are easy to access, but Loqvist wanted to make them less useful to opportunistic criminals.
For the 2008 Design Out Crime Product Design Awards, contributed by the Office of Crime Prevention of WA and Curtin University of Technology, Loqvist developed an idea for a No Climbin wheelie bin. 'After doing 2D form studies I then went on to conducting 3D form studies in the workshop which further helped me develop a suitable form for the wheelie bin to create a non-climbable bin,' says Loqvist.
On the No Climbin the traditional flat lid and rim is replaced with a sloping, curved rim, so climbing onto the bin, and balancing there, is made more difficult. Since the lid is made of a flexible material, it gives no support if someone tries to stand on it.
The design is user-centred as well as focused against crime. The lid has a rigid rim, making it easy for the user to lift. The shorter sides also accommodate the needs of shorter people who can find normal bins too tall.
Loqvist says that there should be a market for designs that seek to prevent crime: 'I do believe there is a large market for designs that deals with crime prevention since crime is something that is increasing.'
While the customers for an anti-crime wheelie bin may be local authorities who sometimes find it difficult to procure innovative new solutions, there are ways design can help make ideas like the No Climbin fit in with existing systems says Loqvist: 'the bin has been designed to fit existing wheelie bin trucks to make the transition as easy as possible. If an idea like the No Climbin were to be taken on by local authorities, I think there should be some collaboration between the designer and the authorities to ensure the design is easy to implement. With the right tools to promote and drive something like this forward to the council I believe that it is certainly possible.'
From Africa
Ushahidi is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Being able to see what and where disturbances, crimes and other events are happening is important way to co-ordinate information from news sources as well as local people.
A new Ushahidi engine is being created using the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web - and map them so that other people can see where problems are occurring.
It is built so that it can work with other websites and online tools and it doesn’t depend on users having access to expensive technology like computers: they can use their mobile phones, a piece of technology 4.1 billion people had access to in December 2008.
Erik Hershman, director of operations at Ushahidi says: ‘We take the stance that you go for the lowest common denominator, which is the SMS enabled mobile phone. So your Nokia 1100 and you say; “If we can make the technology work on this that’s useful for people both on incoming messages and outgoing messages then we have something that’s valuable and let’s see what people do with it.” The first iteration of that was in Kenya during the post election ballots. We quickly created a website. It was a mash-up of maps and incoming mobile phones messages that we called Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili, then what we did was get funding to build a global version of this.’
Ushahidi’s goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs. This tool will be tested and made available as an open source application that others can download, implement and use to bring awareness to crises in their own region. Organizations can also use the tool for internal monitoring purposes.
The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US.
The private alpha of the redesigned Ushahidi Engine was released in October 2008, and is currently undergoing testing in pilot projects including Peace Heroes, the DR Congo crisis and four others.
‘Traditional media tend to have a problem of scale and scope. They can’t get to everywhere that the news is happening,’ says Hershman. ‘We pull the information in from traditional news sources but also ordinary people. Put that on the map so they can see what’s happening.’
Hershman also explains the benefit of taking a local approach to problem solving: ‘If you’re solving African problems let Africans solve those problems. The developers working on Ushahidi are from all over Africa who are developing it for their needs and their locations. If you can make it to the constraints and all the negative things you think about Africa means that if you have the perfect trial zone for creating an application that can work everywhere.’
Find out more at the Ushahidi website
From Europe
Security was seen as an opportunity by designers of European bike hire schemes because if they could design it in, it would set their services apart. ~
To get results, services like Bycyklen, Vélib and Bicing Barcelona designed secure transactions as well as more secure products.