Theft: today's built-in obsolescence

Apparently, you so wish, you may now pop into Harvey Nichols and treat yourself to an anti-surveillance jacket. Designed and manufactured by an outfit calling itself Vexed Generation, the garment zips up right over your face, and has eyeholes just where you'd expect them. Selling at £400 a time, they're going like hot cakes.

They seem like just the thing, don't they, if you fancy celebrating May Day by inflicting gratuitous, insulting and extensive damage on a public monument, or maybe striding through the Saturday crowds in Brixton to plant a nail bomb. So much less obtrusive than a naked visage, crowned with a white baseball cap, bobbing through the cammed-up streets.

They're not, of course, designed for illegal purposes though. Instead they're trendy accoutrements for those who don't like the idea that Big Brother is watching them wandering through Harvey Nichols via the auspices of closed circuit television.

Such anarchs are in the minority, since the vast majority of people are highly supportive of CCTV because of its proven track record in controlling crime. We Brits are already the most watched-over population in the world. Vexed Generation is in the vanguard of the backlash.

This backlash has already been anticipated, not least by Foresight, a branch of the Crime Prevention Panel. In its consultation document, "Just Around The Corner", the possible effects that advancing technology may have on crime are discussed exhaustively. While some of the document manages to remain up and light - "We have been looking at how crime might develop over the next 20 years and whether, with technology, we have a chance to beat it: we do" - it also contains one or two projections which seem frighteningly dystopian.

"In a dehumanised environment," the authors believe, "people may become less 'real' to one another leading to more extreme reactions, interactions and the reluctance to intervene in conflicts"; or "violence, disorder and destruction may result from a growing social exclusion through technological exclusion".

Foresight is also pretty hot on the implications for civil liberties, just like our friends at Vexed Generation. "With the concerns over intrusion and Big Brother, we cannot blithely assume that new technology will offer a panacea. Put crudely, there is often a clash between those looking to safeguard privacy and those looking to increase safety."

The marketing of the anti-surveillance jacket surely is unequivocally representative of this clash.

And infringements of civil liberties aren't the only problem with security cameras. While common sense dictates that the presence of CCTV in some areas will drive crime into other areas, there is also evidence that the technology can be turned to the criminal's advantage. "Pickpockets," says Home Office wonk Paul Ekblom, "can watch commuters helpfully pat their concealed wallets as they pass a "beware pickpockets" poster, residents can monitor television pictures of communal entrances to apartment blocks to see not which stranger is coming in but which neighbour has just gone out."

All rather depressing really, which is why it is comforting to find Mr Ekblom involved in a much more fun initiative, spearheaded by Saint Martins College of Art, and snappily titled Design Against Crime. Mr Ekblom spoke last night to an audience of students, postgraduates, designers, consultants, criminologists, architects, psychologists, anthropologists, futurists, technology specialists and engineers, about the possibility of simply Making Stuff Harder To Nick.

The Design Against Crime project has been set up by Dr Lorraine Gamman, who heads the product design department at Saint Martins. She is an unlikely scourge of the criminal, as she comes from an East End background steeped in crime, and is best known as the biographer of her lifelong friend and Queen of the Shoplifters, Shirley Pitts. However, her passion for design appears to have won out against her ingrained distrust of law, order and authority.

Dr Gamman cites the example of mobile phones, the rate of theft of which is very high, and suggests that this is in the interests of the manufacturers. "Crime," she declares, "is a better form of planned obsolescence than fashion."

She suggests that manufacturers are not motivated to build anti-crime features into their products because they rely on their customers to provide themselves with the insurance which finances the purchase of another product. This, she argues, not only leads to the huge inconvenience of having your belongings stolen, but also creates a threat to personal safety. The more likely we are to be carrying belongings that are easy to steal, the more likely we are to find ourselves under attack.

Plenty of people believe that Dr Gamman is on to something here. Not only are her students hugely inspired by their anti-crime briefs, but the project has attracted £20,000 in funding from the Design Council and support from everybody from the London School of Economics to the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which specialises in personal protection.

When the fact is pointed out to you, it does become apparent that while technology simply must offer many opportunities to make products harder to steal and less useful to the criminal once they are stolen, the only visible evidence of such a trend is in car manufacture.

Again, Paul Ekblom is most illuminating on this subject, although perhaps again a little pessimistic. He cites "design conflict" as being a leitmotif of the development of car security. He has been involved in the area since at least the mid-Eighties, when more than a quarter of all recorded crimes involved theft from, or of, vehicles.

A feasibility study persuaded the government that despite the many difficulties involved in making cars more secure, it should seek to "press and assist manufacturers" to move in this direction.

The problem was the car manufacturers' lack of motivation to address the problem in a competitive market where cost is paramount. The car manufacturers were not persuaded to get behind the problem via legislation, but through "a series of government initiatives intended to create a climate in which consumers' choice of model took security into account". The piÿce de résistance was the publication of the Car Theft Index, which ranks models by risk of theft per vehicle on the road. So it was that the car industry moved away from the humble agency of the afterthought Krooklock, to taking some responsibility for selling less vulnerable cars.

The "design conflict" aspect of matters comes in when the criminals - who Dr Gamman respectfully describes as "resourceful consumers" - start adapting. Mr Ekblom has been informed by the police that car thieves will now rent a new model to study it for vulnerabilities. One model, whose central locking system relied on compressed air lines, was found to open obligingly when a tennis ball with a hole cut into it was placed over a door lock and bashed.

The solution here, according to the designs of the Saint Martins students, and also according to Foresight, is to make "current targets for the opportunistic criminal, such as cash, electrical entertainment goods, bank cards and cameras less attractive [so that] their ability to function is tied to the legitimate user".

Technology offers many opportunities for manufacturers to be able to achieve this, through advances in tagging, tracking, coating and immobilisers, as well as smart cards and even smart cloth.

All of these options are being explored as part of the Design Against Crime initiative, and the signs are that there are already many design innovations that could be adopted by manufacturers. In the meantime, it is the manufacturers who gain from product theft and the insurance companies, the tax-payers and the environment that lose. In the end, once again, it is up to us, the consumers, to demand a better deal, before the future is dealt, unasked, to us.

d.orr@independent.co.uk