Vaissnavi Shukl
What if we approached urban crime as a design problem, and deployed our methods and skills to reframe the questions we have been asking to ameliorate if not completely obliterate criminal activities. The team at Designing Out Crime Research Centre, a collaboration between the New South Wales Department of Community and Justice and the University of Technology Sydney did just that. They use research, public engagement and human centred design to tackle a wide range of urban challenges from fabricating a bin to detect bomb threats to adding more food trucks for reducing alcohol related crimes in downtown Sydney, Designing Out Crime focused on the process of design rather than the final output of design. Today, we have with us Dr. Lindsay Asquith who was the director of the research centre to talk about human behaviour and how one could use design to come up with novel solutions for social issues.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

Why don’t we start off with you telling us a little bit about Designing Out Crime, it’s early days and what led you to it?

Lindsay Asquith
Yeah, sure. So, Designing Out Crime came into being really because we, at the University of Technology, Sydney decided to answer a tender request that had gone out from the New South Wales Department of Justice. And they were looking at innovative ways to tackle crime in… in New South Wales. And at the time in the School of Design, Kees Dorst had begun to look at how design methodologies could be used to tackle some of crime’s most complex intractable problems. So we answered the call. We did a sort of non conforming tender which meant we wrote our own and we’ve won the bet, and therefore, the first funding was for the first three years we were paid an amount by the New South Wales Department of Justice to look into some crime problems that they identified as being what they call ‘Premier’s priorities’. So that’s how it started and it was started with only about three people and then we grew to around 12 made up of architects, industrial designers, criminologist, psychologist, historians, visual designers. So the way that we approached chrome problems was from all these different disciplines. So using all the methodologies that individual designers and those from other disciplines use to to approach problems. So it was never just one way of looking at crime. So it wasn’t looking at crime through a crime lens and sometimes we looked at it through a design lens, but also a sort of psychology lens and anthropology lens and all always it was about putting people at the centre of it. So it was all about human centred design. So looking at all the stakeholders involved in problems in all the crime problems, so not just the police or victims, but everyone who is affected by a certain problem. So that’s how it came about. And we used a lot of design tools based on a method called ‘frame creation’, which is where we reframed problems. So we looked at a problem, generally, a client or the government would come to us thinking that, you know, they had defined the problem, but what we would do is spend about 90% of the time understanding the problem and sort of only 10% looking at solutions. So it was really about understanding what lay beneath the problem. Most crime problems, they haven’t really changed over time, you know, we still are dealing with a lot of the same crime issues, but we have through time we’ve been using the same solutions. So maybe more and more CCTV, maybe more policing. And so by actually really going beneath what was on the surface and looking at underlying, usually social issues, and seeing where we could use design to intervene, to change behaviour, really. That was the fundamental thing. So it was really spending a lot of time thinking about people thinking about what was important to them, how they behaved, what made them do what they did in certain situations and then using design to come up with novel solutions.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So if you had to talk about, say, your first project that you worked on, once it got the tender, what was the first project like? And I think after that, we can go on to the other very interesting projects that you… that you all did.

Lindsay Asquith
So the first project was really a lot of the projects we did to begin with were actually products. So one of the first ones was to design a bin for railway stations. So and… it was to stop the threat of terrorism really. So we designed the with Rail, Rail corp at the time a bin and this was a student project actually, where we designed a bin that had us which was see-through and it had a very small aperture at the top. So it wasn’t so much about the bomb itself, if there was a terrorist threat. It was more that there were terrorist sets that meant that there was so much disruption. Whereas with this bin, you could see immediately what was in it and therefore, you know, counterterrorism police could deal with it more effectively. It was one of the first products we designed. And then we went on to design things for woollies, and just shelves shelving to mitigate the risk of shoplifting. So at that time, the sort of things that were stolen were mostly things like high end, things that cost more money like actually baby formula, makeup, razor blades, that sort of thing. So we designed shelving that actually not only lit up as people approached it, but also had descriptions of products. So instead of making the whole experience one of more sort of like more CCTV or more security stuff patrolling it was actually trying to enhance customer satisfaction as well. So the shelving was nice, it was good, but it might be let that you were lingering longer, which meant there was more likely to be people in the aisles and therefore less similar eyes on the street, we call it so it was looking at different ways of creating less opportunity for shoplifting. And maybe at the same time making the experience better for all customers because if you design something for the 10% who are going to behave badly, you are actually taken away from, you know, the rest of the population than 90% who are actually trying to enjoy a shopping experience.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So almost like creating a communal accountability of sorts while you’re out shopping so that if one person was trying to get something, the other five who are there making sure it doesn’t happen or is this creating that accountability that you’re on the viewers… or local surveillance almost Yeah, exactly. 

Lindsay Asquith
So you know, when lighting comes up, it’s gonna you know, it’s going to detract you from trying because you know, you’re more highlighted at the time that you might decide to put something in your bag. So that was something that we trialed. So those were the first sort of first kind of projects and then we sort of, you know, crime prevention has changed over the years and we started to get more into social and systems design. So it wasn’t just products. It was actually how you can intervene in systems, and, you know, it wasn’t just about making cities safer. There were all sorts of different things where we felt that we could make a difference. So one of the biggest, I suppose one of the biggest projects we did was with the City of Sydney Council where we looked at Kings Cross. And at that time, it was around 2012-2013 Kings Cross was, you know, always in the news, there was alcohol related violence, a lot of the clubs and bars had had problems with violence. So they asked us to look at what we could do… to help with that, you know, what were the underlying causes of this so we ran a lot of stakeholder workshops. We did some student design studios as well. We did a lot of surveillance, we went out and about at night on the streets to actually observe what was going on. And what we discovered was that 80 to 90% of the people going out and Kings Cross, it’s their 18 year olds going out for a good night, they’re not going to cause trouble. It’s a rite of passage. Kings Cross has always been a rite of passage. It’s a bit edgy. You know, it’s a bit grungy and it was something that everybody, you know, wanted to do go out in Kings Cross. What we found was that it wasn’t so much Kings Cross itself, it was all the services around it that were not working to make that night a good one. There wasn’t enough transport in and out of Kings Cross which is quite a densely populated area and there’s a lot of bars in a very small area. So you’ve got a lot of congestion on the streets, outside clubs and nightclubs. You don’t have enough toilets, things like that. There were some… There were not only big clubs, there was nothing else, there were no other I suppose distractions and nothing else was open. It was basically just alcohol. So we looked at all these things and we thought, well, how can we reframe it? What the City of Sydney wanted was how we could create a vibrant but safe night time. So we used our design methodology, which I sort of mentioned, which is ‘frame creation’ to reframe the problem. So we looked at how we could view Kings Cross in a different way and what new frame could we use to look at it? So all the stakeholders got together and we came up with, that if we looked at it like if imagined the King’s Cross was organised like an event like a music festival, how could you make it work better? So you then immediately start to think about all the services that are required to make a music festival successful? And they’re all to do with the transport, food options, toilets. Different attractions apart from the main attractions you know what music festivals, you have the main you might have a main event or a main star but around it there’s a lot of other things going on which dissipates crowd so that you don’t get lots of crowds at one space all of the time. So we looked at the whole thing through this lens and what it meant was the city of Sydney we were able to sort of just start to think of it in a different way. But if it wasn’t if you didn’t look at it through the lens of alcohol related violence, but as if it was a music festival, you would immediately start to bring some positive things and you would start to positively redefine the nighttime. And they began by doing a whole new nighttime strategy which was called Open Sydney. So instead of thinking about it as a closed thing, you know that they wanted to shut down things. How can you make it open and more attractive to lots of different demographics? What they wanted was to just not have the 18 year olds out but actually attract more women and more families. 

So they looked… it wasn’t just Kings Cross it, they started to make changes they… the whole night time strategy involved things like creating more opportunities for small bars to thrive. So instead of there just being large venues and small bars can host around hundred patrons at maximum, and they have a different licence and also they attract all the people they attract that forty plus, no, you know, they’re quieter and that sort of afterwork vibe. And then also they started a trial to food truck programme so that there could be more options for food to soak up alcohol at night so people could and food trucks you know, generally you don’t want to go out for dinner if you’re drinking but you do need something to eat so more options with food trucks around certain areas of the city where people could get food for 24 hours when the clubs were open. So those… and then they tried putting in temporary toilets every Friday and Saturday night in the city and in Kings Cross just increasing the availability of that thing. And also night time buses. So to bus people out to where they could get their trains or home because a lot of people come from all over, you know, they’re coming from the north south, not just from city to city and it was hard to get home. And that’s where a lot of the trends of… this kind of violence was happening not in the clubs themselves, but actually in the streets around in the taxi queues. They tried to secure taxi ranks where you had more security guards, monitoring and the queues and all that. Then in 2012 there was no Uber so I think taxi rounds were the thing to get in and out.

Vaissnavi Shukl
There’s two questions I’m wondering which one I should ask first, but okay. Let’s go with the flow. And maybe just talk a little bit about the relationship between design and crime. So the cases that you mentioned, the products or the solutions kind of freed from the design of a physical product to almost like a strategy or even a policy of sorts where you’re talking about looking at an entire area and then involving different stakeholders whether they are bar owners or whether they are the people from the transportation department and looking at a problem from kind of a zoomed out lens rather than a zoomed in lens. And wondering if we were to think about inserting design in obviously the process of crime but just thinking about whether design comes at a stage of prevention, or it comes at a stage of retrospective cure? I don’t know if it makes any sense. What do you think about how design interacts with a particular crime? I mean, most times that surveillance comes in and in the intro season trailer, I was just talking about how I’ve been reading a lot about Shoshana Zuboff and Michel Foucault and they all talk about surveillance in very different ways. Either surveillance as a way of creating discipline, which is, I guess what we’re trying to do when you’re talking about redesigning the shelves is, you know, when you design shows in a certain way, it disciplines the person who’s probably aiming to shoplift to behave in a certain way, which is to not shoplift. But in other ways, I think where design comes from… is to kind of look at something that has already happened retrospectively, analyse it, and then enter into this cyclical movement where you try to shift it from the place of a cure to a place of prevention. So with your experience in designing out crime, did you ever think about where you position yourselves in this process? whether it was always aimed towards prevention, I guess that’s the ideal goal, but whether it was at any point, a retrospective act…

Lindsay Asquith
I think, yeah, I think really, that’s what happens is that often we want to be involved much early on in the process, you know, so that we, you can have an influence before, you know, so you can be more proactive than reactive in what you’re designing. So, you know, it would be wonderful if cities were designed with the safety of women, you know, paramount, you know, at the beginning, rather than having to look at areas where crimes against women or whatever you’re looking at have occurred and then redesign and re…maybe remodelling something then but actually, to have I mean Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design is was a, you know, a big thing while we when we were doing this, but we we saw that as only going so far. Whereas with designing out crime we really the whole thing about it was to really understand people and how people react in space or react to things So really trying to get to the bottom of human centred design and human values and actually being very positive about you know, designers are positive, you know, we are always trying to make things better. We’re always trying to increase the experience of the user. And therefore, when we were approached often by clients, sometimes it was at the stage where something had already been designed, like a park or something. Then they realised there were issues. So there’s a few times when we were able to be proactive. We went to Barangaroo, which is a big, big area and Sydney that was being designed. We actually were approached at the design stage, so that we could look at things like the lighting but also how tall the trees should be that sort of thing. So you know, how that that natural would that would that weather and we did a whole series of looking at parks throughout Sydney to get an idea of and looking at the crime statistics and which parks were safer than others and why that might be and was it to do with lighting was it to do with the fact where they were? Was it you know, with their location in it with respect to the things that were around it? Was it to do with the fact that they shut at a certain time or that they were constantly open? So it was really, when we were involved early on. I would say that that’s when we prefer to be involved so that we could have a…I think design should always be right at the beginning of anything really it is it’s important to to really make that difference as early on as you can so that you’re being proactive rather than having to react to something that that has happened and therefore designing all that on the sort of back foot really, and we brought you so there’s a book that we brought out from Designing Out Crime called ‘Designing for the Common Good’, and that’s got a whole whole range of the project projects that we’ve worked on over the years and really it’s that common good that was important. It’s not designing just for one group, but being very inclusive in the design so that you know all groups who use space or are impacted by something, have a say in the solution, which is why so much of the work we did was stakeholder engagement workshops, really getting to the bottom of…of what the problem was not just for one group of people, but for all groups using that who might be part of the solution now or could be part of the solution in the future.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And maybe if would you say that also involves rethinking the definition of design because when we think about design, we by default, think of it as a solution to something but the way you’re describing it it almost seems like it, of course, in your team involved people from different backgrounds and design, not always took the form of producing something but also kind of aiming at problems more structurally so that you address, maybe the root cause if that’s ever possible to do when you’re talking about crime, but still look at it as a tool rather than a product. In that sense. I’ve always wondered because either legally or even in terms of policy making, every time there’s… there’s something that happens and there’s an effort to prevent it from happening again. There’s in terms of what is produces always a manual of sorts or a law of sorts or a guideline of sorts. And because you’re working with such different projects in such different scales, I’ve always been curious to really think about the role of manual and whether, you know, all the observations put together in the form of a manual with certain recommendations or certain things to do one thing is to not do, what was your experience with, I don’t know, just making guidelines because if we were to make something more accessible to the public, I think it has to be in the form of something that is more I don’t want to say prescribed but kind of that like you know, this is the best way to do this or comes in form of recommendations. What are your thoughts on manuals and just guides?

Lindsay Asquith
I think they do have their place. I mean, we did a project for legal aid, where we did a whole series of guidelines and you know, some of our projects do, you know, what people would think the client comes up and they do want guidelines and they do want recommendations, you know, to go forward. I think  the thing that you have to be aware of is not being too prescriptive about things as things change, environments change. If we brought out a say a manual for Kings Cross within two years they were lockout… lockdown, you know, it was a very different situation. Things happen and you have to be able to adapt and I think really, it’s about what we’ve always felt is this is about the methods you use to look at things so you know, the methods that we use can be adapted to any situation really because there they are about understanding deeply whatever problem we look at, and reframing it so that problem might shift like things cross problem was not alcohol related violence after three or four years so so much as it became all about the lockdown laws and lockouts and things just became this place where there was nobody, which was equally sad and had its own problems, yes. So, and that was because of those government interventions. So, sometimes the problem shifts but our methodology is designed so that it really is designed to get to the heart of the problem, what you know, whatever it is, and you can adapt it to different contexts. You know, I think governments often they do want us to come in… we can help with strategy and all of those things but guidelines sometimes if you… I don’t want to sound, they become standards, you know…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

Lindsay Asquith
So you’re always designing for a standard and therefore not optimising the possibility of designing for the best you can do. And that’s what I think we always strive to as designers to design the best environment, you know, given all the different circumstances that you’re having to look at.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I think the reason why I was really drawn to your work was one because the way you approached any problem, any case, was through multiple different lenses. Usually what happens is if for example, if if it’s a question of, you know, women’s safety in a city, you would, unless it reaches a level that is really worrisome, first there’s no action, at least speaking from my experience in India, and if there’s something that does happen that you know, pushes people to think about women’s safety, you would ideally have the government creating a panel of sorts like a committee to look into the problem and then come up with the best ways in which it could be avoided or postponed, if not avoided. And what the way you approached it was fascinating because you’re not really talking about it in the form of a committee, which usually is homogeneous, but you had a team which was more heterogeneous and which came from all different backgrounds and different perspectives and that’s why the recommendation or the output was very varied and very different and it’s kind of also a little sad to know that Designing Out Crime kind of what doesn’t exist in its original form anymore. I wouldn’t say it’s doesn’t exist at all, but I would love to know what’s in the pipeline for you and maybe DRC version 2.0 If you’ve thought about it?

Lindsay Asquith
I would love to, yes, I mean, you know, I think like all university sectors during the pandemic, you know, you know, research, unfortunately has had to take a backseat and therefore fundings not always so, you know, crime problems haven’t gone away. So I said…

Vaissnavi Shukl
And they never will, right? I think the nature will always evolve but it’s… it’s such an integral part of society… it’s just human behaviour in one way or another.

Lindsay Asquith
I think that to be honest no, there were ten-twelve people who working together in a multidisciplinary team for,you know, ten years. And although those people are no longer all working together in one place, they are now in other organisations and I suppose transmitting their knowledge. And so actually, even if Designing Out Crime as a…as a physical centre doesn’t exist anymore, the people that have worked on all these problems are still there, and can shake things as we move forward. I still think that all my colleagues over the years will be making a difference as designers in various different arenas, and it might be crime… I mean, we were moving away from crime prevention, more into other social, more social issues and actually, we’re now in a few of us still embedded in the School of Design and we are looking at social transitions, transition design, how, you know, all the knowledge that we’ve got from from the way we’ve tried to change how design… how crime is approached, can be used in other contexts, like climate change, you know, health, you know, mental health, and so that’s where we’re moving. So, the methodologies stay quite consistent. The context might change, but crime, you know, is always going to be there, but it’s, you know, recently we’ve been dealing with… dealing with domestic violence, which is, which is very different, you know, using a design methodology on domestic violence is a very tricky thing, but it and it takes great patience. And understanding of all the people involved, and really looking at the victims, perpetrators society itself, and working out, you know, what can we do as designers to look at this problem, and I think we will always those, those of us who’ve cut our teeth in Designing Out Crime will always be looking at complex social issues, in whatever we’re doing going forward and using our, I suppose, our knowledge of what we’ve done before but also, the design tools and methods adapt along the way and create new ones. So yeah, I feel quite optimistic. Even though we’re not all together, I still feel very optimistic that somewhere we’re all making a difference. And designing things as we’ve always said for the common good.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well, as you said, that is a very optimistic note to end this on. I will be on the lookout Linsay to see, you know, what happens next, maybe not Designing Out Crime, maybe it’ll spiral into something more innovative and more fascinating and maybe addressing a different set of problems. So I do want to thank you for your time and for…for this interview. This was actually very insightful. Thank you so much.

Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.