This project focuses on ‘hot products’, the increasingly sophisticated electronic devices such as phones, MP3 players and mobile game consoles that are tempting not only to a large proportion of the population but also to thieves. The project aims to improve mobile phone security. By bringing together expertise from the worlds of design, industry, law enforcement and the very people most affected by crime, the project hopes to bring about further innovation and encourage others to ‘think crime’ in the first stages of product development.
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Hot products are the gadgets and accessories that so many of us love to buy including MP3 players, laptops and sat navs. Increased ownership has brought down the over-the-counter cost of mobile phones, but research shows that the value
of the software, music, photographs and other data we carry on them is rising.
Any technology that is popular is ‘hot’. Unfortunately, demand for hot products means increased risk that they will be the target of criminals. The proliferation of small, high value personal electronics means that stealing them is now one of Britain’s fastest-growing crimes.
But it is not only the perpetrators or their victims who recognise the significance
of hot product crime. Manufacturers also realise there is a growing issue here, as do designers.
Young people and hot product crime
Mobile phone theft largely happens to young people, because they are generally the most common owners and prolific users of the latest hot products. The 2007–08 British Crime Survey (BCS) shows that around a quarter of victims of mobile phone theft were aged between 10 and 17 and nearly half were aged between 10 and 24.
Desirability
Young people are increasingly likely to be carrying expensive electronic items around with them. Those in the Design Council’s research workshops indicated that on average they carried £184 worth of equipment – including phones, MP3 players and games consoles – when they went out. The survey also showed a relationship between the estimated value of products and concern about them being stolen.
Desensitisation
Many young people in the UK accept
crime as a fact of life. Of those who had a hot product stolen in the three years preceding the survey, 66% did not report the theft to the police. In some cases, there was even an acceptance that being physically attacked for a phone or MP3 player was unremarkable and unavoidable.
Opportunism
Many hot products are stolen simply because there is an opportunity to steal them. The 2005–06 BCS reported that 69% of mobile phones stolen were unattended.
Location
There are regional differences in the locations where young people are most vulnerable. For example, 51% of thefts from 11–16 year olds in Greater London occurred in a street or park, compared to 32% across England.
Mobile phones in schools
Teachers and police have warned that the fashion for school children to carry expensive mobile phones and MP3 players makes them targets for thieves and bullies. Although some schools don’t allow pupils to bring in certain hot products, this rule is not always followed. In the case of mobile phones, parents often prefer their children to carry them for safety reasons. Research indicates that 80% of 11–17 year olds feel safer when carrying a mobile phone.
Vulnerability
Design Council research found that 31% of young people who had experienced hot product theft while they had the product with them were actually using the device, or a different one, at the time. They were either, listening to music on headphones, talking or texting on a mobile or playing on a games console. Being absorbed in this way makes people less aware of their surroundings – a crime prevention officer compared the decrease in awareness to being drunk. Under these circumstances, young people are highly vulnerable to crime.
Ownership
There are currently systems for registering ownership of hot products, and for identifying a product’s owner after it has been stolen. However, despite some awareness of these systems, young people generally do not use them. The Design Council survey found that only just over a third (37%) of young people use a PIN code on their mobile phone.
Rapidly developing technologies are allowing for smaller devices with more wireless connections. It is predicted that phones and MP3 players will soon be the size of badges or pendants – some will fit into an ear piece – and will be coupled with new display technologies such as flexible plastic screens.
These technological advances will make small, high-value devices even more attractive to thieves, so they must be developed with anti-crime measures in mind
Portable navigation tools
Global Positions System (GPS) technology is standard in the majority
of phones, offering new ways of securing devices and potential new business opportunities for recovering them.
Wearable computing
Trends are moving towards integrating networking capabilities into clothing, linking equipment such as phones and MP3 players via a network of wires within the clothes. The security benefits are clear: equipment is hidden from view and less vulnerable. The fully integrated versions will also be more difficult to steal and resell.
Less obtrusive headphones
A trend is emerging for wireless earphones: these are less visible and therefore a less obvious target for thieves.
Radio frequency ID (RFID) tags and bluetooth dongles
These small tags can be integrated into equipment to provide a unique identification number that can be picked up by a scanner.
Facial recognition
Facial recognition software is increasingly replacing passwords to control access to laptops. This is being extended to allow access to digital cameras and mobile phones.
Plastic electronics
Low cost electronics are being produced which conduct electricity using an inkjet printing process rather than complex circuit board manufacturing. One of the first target areas for this technology is disposable mobile phones. With low cost screens and electronics, these phones can be reduced to a few pounds in price. This reduces the resale value and attractiveness to thieves.
Single line fingerprint sensors
Single Line Fingerprint Sensors require the user to swipe his or her finger across the sensor surface to acquire a fingerprint image and access to a device. These are being integrated into portable equipment, particularly mobile phones, as the cost of the sensor falls after becoming mainstream on laptop PCs.
Contactless debit and credit cards
Instead of swiping a card or handing it to a cashier, this technology allows customers to simply present their debit or credit card, or a NFC enabled mobile phone, close to a reader and their payment will be processed.
The car industry
The car industry has been dealing with the threat of indiscriminate crime for decades. At the peak of the crime-wave in 1995, it became a legal requirement for new cars to incorporate anti-theft technologies such as immobilisers, and now theft levels have dropped significantly. These lessons could well apply to the hi-tech industry, but would require an overall increase in security, not just for the concerned few.
Designers already know that crime happens but only some have created products, services or environments that tackle it. The design challenge is to create gadgets that are both highly secure and/or distinctive enough to encourage consumers but discourage thieves.
For a design to be really effective at crime-proofing products, services or environments, designers need to think about how what they create might be affected by crime. In the context of hot product theft, designers have been using an acronym, CRAVED, to help them understand why products are desirable to steal. It stands for: Concealable, Removable, Available, Valuable, Enjoyable and Disposable. And
if a product has any of these characteristics it is likely to be attractive to thieves.
What makes a product attractive to customers may also make it attractive to thieves – a crucial factor when using design to address crime. Professor Ron Clarke16 identified 25 techniques to prevent crime in specific situations, including:
- Making products or services more difficult for criminals to attack
- Controlling access to spaces or products that might be a target for criminals
- Increasing surveillance in an area prone to crime or around a product that’s desirable
- Increasing people’s responsibility for their own products or spaces
- Reducing anonymity of a criminal who attacks
- Disguising or concealing valuables
- Denying criminals the benefits of stealing.
According to the 2007–08 British Crime Survey, 78% of people in the UK own a mobile phone.
Mobile theft is a serious and costly problem in the UK and this can only increase with the proliferation of mobile commerce, or m-commerce, where phones are used to transfer money or pay for shopping.
As recently as a decade ago, mobile phones could only just about manage to store text messages and contact books. Where once we could only talk and text on the move, we can now play games, make and share videos and carry whole music libraries on our small personal gadgets. The latest smartphones incorporate GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors, they are also able to automatically download emails and appointments for office computers. Today, phones are being used to make payments, travel and do banking, even internationally.
According to the UK fraud prevention service Cifas, mobile phone identity fraud saw a 74% in the first half of 2009 and it is thought that this may represent only a fraction of the true scale of the problem.
Security
Mobile phone security is a huge challenge both for operators and consumers, and as technology has advanced it has become even more important that what is stored
on a mobile phone cannot be accessed by anyone else.
How can designers and technologists work together to develop new products, systems and services that address the problem of mobile phone theft? What will these new solutions look like? At the heart of any solution should be a clear indication of how it will be used by people in their day-to-day lives. Any solution should be easily adopted by the general public, and as such should be fundamentally based on both advances in technology and user-centred design.
Thieves change tactics
Mobile phone companies and designers are always fighting to stay one step ahead of criminals. Companies brought in a new identification system in 2002 to try to stop phone theft. But it is thought many criminals have simply switched tactics. Instead of trying to sell stolen phones in the UK, they now export them to other countries for a fraction of their market value.
Phones of the future
It is estimated that soon handsets could keep tabs on an individual’s health, pay their bills and more. Though such developments should bring many benefits to people’s lives, security is expected to become more of a problem. To counter this, manufacturers are developing more secure ways of encrypting data on handsets.
How designers can help
The challenge is to design a solution to improve mobile phone security; so it able to combat the next generation of phone theft that could see our cash and personal information at risk as never before.
The Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime believes designers can improve mobile phone security by collaborating with technology experts to create handsets and security devices that mean mobiles, and the data on them, are less vulnerable to criminals.
The skills and processes that encompass ‘design’ are already used to create innovative new products and services. Designers’ expertise’ are equally well suited to tackling pressing social problems such as mobile phone crime.
Understanding the problem
Design is a problem solving discipline and at the start of every project designers need to do research that helps them fully understand the problem they have been asked to address. Once designers have compiled facts and evidence about the problem, their focus shifts to the needs of the people and customers the design project could affect.
Getting to know the users and abusers
Designers commonly focus on delivering products and services that meet user needs, but when designing out crime they also need to think about abusers, or perpetrators. They need to know and understand users and abusers. To tackle the issue of mobile phone crime, designers need to understand how perpetrators operate. They also need to consider how legitimate users will be affected by any changes; mobile phone thefts affect the people that use phones, the manufacturers that produce them, and the companies that insure them.
Searching for appropriate materials and technologies
Designers understand their ideas need to be manufactured on a mass scale to become a commercial reality, so they collaborate with materials and technology experts; they don’t restrict themselves to looking for inspiration in the market they are designing for. Other product markets can solve crime in a way that can be modified to make an impact in additional markets too.
Prototyping to test and using results to develop ideas
Prototypes are useful to bring ideas to life, turning concepts into a 3D form that can be judged for scale, feel and performance. More sophisticated prototypes are essential for rigorous testing and they are helpful when testing designs with users to help them understand how a final product will feel and how they will use it. Prototypes are also essential as production models to explain how the product could be manufactured
at scale.
In April 2009, some of the UK’s top designers partnered with technology experts to take part in the Mobile Phone Security Challenge, a national competition to create ‘crime proof’ mobile phones. The Challenge was one project in Design out Crime, an initiative from the Home Office’s Design & Technology Alliance Against Crime and the Design Council, supported by the Technology Strategy Board.
A design brief with three scenarios was created to show how designers could approach the Challenge. Three teams were commissioned to design their responses to the brief. The teams, each made up of design and technology specialists, were tasked with developing new ways of securing mobile phone handsets, the data they contain and their future use as electronic wallets when m-commerce technology is introduced to the UK.
The teams sought to produce market-ready solutions which could include hardware and software for handsets, new services and other innovations. They have developed and refined their concepts with the help of a panel of experts from across the mobile, technology and design industries, and have worked together to design solutions across three key areas:
- Making mobile phone handsets harder or less desirable to steal
- Making the data stored on mobile phones harder or less desirable to steal
- Making future m-commerce transaction secure and fraud proof.