Designing Out Crime

Designers already know that crime happens but only some have created products, services or environments that tackle it.

For some designers, there has been a business imperative to design out crime. They have responded to business and consumer demands for more security. The Best Bar None scheme rewards pubs and bars that have designed-in security, and school uniforms that incorporate stab-proof materials are being bought by frightened parents for their children.

Communication design

Graphic designers too have been inspired to raise awareness of crime. Posters for the Home Office ‘Let's keep crime down’ initiative use black and yellow stripes, like police crime scene tape, around images of common crime victims such as a student listening to his MP3 player on a quiet underground station platform.

A simple solution 

Designers thought about how they could deny thieves the benefit of stealing ICT equipment from schools after the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) asked them to help cut the number of projector thefts. After 195 projectors had been stolen from schools in London during the first three months of 2005, Becta wanted a simple, lowcost solution. Designers said, ‘Make school projectors orange’ and since 2006, when 10 manufacturers started producing orange projectors, thieves have been denied the benefit of stealing projectors from schools because they are difficult to sell on. A company called Comproom then produced posters to advertise the reason for colouring projectors orange.

Aritistic inspiration

For some designers, thinking about how to cut crime has inspired artistic concepts. Khashayar Naimanan has designed a range of expensive handpainted tableware called Incognito where it’s the underside that’s painted so criminals don't see the value.Naimanan has also come up with a way to hide precious metals. If they are shaped into nails they can be hidden in what appears to be a standard cardboard box of nails for DIY.  

Opportunistic designs

Then there's Manila Mac, which took inspiration from the Apple Macbook Air adverts which show the latest thin laptop being taken out of a manila document folder. It has created a padded secure laptop case that looks just like a document folder, so whoever’s carrying it doesn’t appear to have anything more valuable than a sheaf of paper. 

Making designs work 

But for a design to be really effective at crimeproofing 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 stealable.

And if a product has any of these characteristics it is likely to be attractive to thieves.

There are also some techniques designers might use to generate ideas for how to crime-proof their products. Professor Ron Clarke identified 25 situational crime prevention techniques to kick-start thinking about how to design out crime, which include:

• 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.

As the orange projectors show, designs don’t have to be complicated to cut crime. On the right you will see a set of more inspirational case studies which show how designers have taken innovative approaches to cutting crime.

The Design Council is also involved in a project to encourage designers and makers of hot products like mobile phones, MP3 players and bikes to design in security. Soon we hope to have developed more case studies of projects currently underway where design tools and techniques are being used to tackle crime.