Spike Spondike
Designer, Design Against Crime Research Centre
Yeah, I think a lot of teenagers are having phones stolen. A lot of them are carrying them more. It seems like you ask anybody who’s a teenager, they will have a mobile phone. They’ll have an mp3 player. They have all these gadgets now. So really one of the big challenges is to create something that’s desirable to use in the first place and it’s not just some clunky object that doesn’t go with their outfit and that sort of thing: so we need to be sure that it doesn’t look criminal [laughs], or it doesn’t look ugly and they want to use it.
Professor Lorraine Gamman
Design Against Crime Research Centre
Well, there’s two parts to it. The first part is the crime science. We look at the evidence about the way criminals steal things and we try to inhibit them, block the crime. And the design function is to apply the theory to the practice and so we connect our ideas about situations of crime prevention that talks about designing out criminal opportunities. So, we explained perpetrator techniques to our designers and basically they applied the theory to the practice and so, we noticed that pickpockets and bag thieves tend to steal bags either from the floor or over the side of the chair. So, with the furniture that we’ve designed, we’ve customised a Series Seven chair that now has cut-outs in the fronts so you can sit on your handbag.
Adam Thorpe
Designer, Camden Bike Stand
At the Design Against Crime research centre, our team observed 8,500 people locking their bikes up and realised that of the 180 ways of doing so, most people locked in one of seven -and there are a lot of people that were locking their bikes insecurely. With a conventional Sheffield stand, the easiest thing for the user to do, when they roll their bike up next to it, is lock the crossbar onto the stand which comes across here with the Sheffield stands, and secure it like that. If they do that, then they’ll get their wheels stolen or the bike can be levered apart from the lock: an insecure way of locking. With the M stand or Camden stand as we call it, the easiest thing for the user to do here, is not this. You’ll never lock your bike like that on this stand. The easiest thing to do is take your lock through here, and by doing that, what you’ve done is you’ve actually secured the wheel, the frame and the stand and filled the lock. So, this stand is easy for a cyclist to lock their bike securely and it makes it more difficult therefore, for a thief, a bike thief, to steal the bike from this stand.
Peter Cochrane
Futurologist, Cochrane Associates
There are many different approaches that we can take, and they’re all simple to prevent the crime that we’re now looking at. Very easily, we could wear a dongle that’s secreted somewhere on our clothing. You steal my mobile device… once you’re three metres or more away from me, it stops working. Until you come back to me and give me that device, it won’t work anymore. That’s extremely easy to do with Bluetooth. All the devices have got cameras on. How difficult is it to point the camera of your mobile phone at yourself and do facial recognition and say, yeah, I’ll work for you but I won’t work for anyone else. There are dozens of solutions to the problem.
Why isn’t the industry already taking such measures? Why aren’t they building in theft preventative devices? The question is how are they going to make money. There’s no demand because nobody knows it can be done. And the way they’re going to make money out of it is by linking through to the insurance companies. It’s so obvious. Instead of thinking in stovepipe way where there’s insurance over there and the mobile industry is over here, how about putting them both together? Both sides can actually make money and profit from it, and the customers will be real happy to pay. Supposing my mobile phone is stolen. It’s not the cost of the hardware - it’s the loss of all that information that’s a killer. I’m looking for an integrated service from a mobile operator that says, if my mobile phone is stolen, 1) they disable it immediately without me even having to tell them and 2) they ship to me a replacement within the hour by parcel or courier service and it looks exactly like the one I just had stolen. That’s not hard to do and it’s something I’m willing to pay for.