About the Author

Lorraine Gamman is Professor of Design at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and founder of its Design Against Crime (DAC) Research Centre. It aims to help designers get smart quick about crime and to show them the best ways available to prevent, or design out opportunities for crime in products, environments and services. Gamman prioritizes attention to criminal perpetrator techniques in her work. She teaches designers to understand what she calls the “criminal gaze”, and argues that, if designers want to design out crime they first need to understand how criminals see the world and commit crime.

Gamman cites Shirley Pitts as a big influence, an inspiration, upon her decision in 1999 to found the DAC Research Centre. Shirley’s simple foiled lined bags – that enabled her to walk out of the shops despite security tags with everything that caught her eye – was an innovation, even if one linked to the dark side of creativity. It also tells us why design and designers needs to do better to design out such opportunities for crime. Gamman’s work at the DAC Research Centre encourages designers to be more creative and enterprising than criminals, by thinking thief, and to look for opportunities to design out crime and deliver innovation.

Gamman’s main argument is that criminals are made not born, in many cases by too easy crime opportunities, that are often enabled by poor design, that does little to prevent or deter crime.

She also asserts that designers and criminals often have creativity in common, and that education, and the privilege of a stable home environment, can make all the difference to how such creativity is used and deployed.

Gamman has catalysed several product ranges that aim to design out bag and bike theft, and the DACRC has won a number of awards for design Innovation. She also has written several books and numerous articles on design and visual culture.

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