ABSTRACT
Design against crime (DAC) uses the processes and products of design to reduce crime and promote community safety. As will be seen, the focus in this chapter is specifically on the design of ‘movable’ products as opposed to places, systems and messages, although, in so doing, many general issues are covered. The aim is less to review in detail the range of product design, to cover implementation issues in much depth or to assess the limited hard evidence of impact and cost-effectiveness, and more to communicate designers’ ways of thinking and acting to researchers and practitioners of crime prevention. In earlier papers I have urged designers to think thief about their products (Ekblom 1995, 1997). Here, the emphasis is more on encouraging crime preventers to draw on design, both practically and conceptually. Mapping out the nature and diversity of design is important, too, because preventers have a range of assumptions about what it means.
