Today’s interesting task was attending the Curtin Uni Design Out Crime award presentation. The competition is run by the Curtin design and urban planning bunch and the Office of Crime Prevention of WA with the intention of promoting interesting designs to reduce crime.
The winner was Park Friend – an outdoor seat which doubles up as a bike rack. The idea here was that people are always around the bikes, hence the baddies are less inclined to steal them.
Tele and I came second with Tagless, otherwise known as Graffiti Detect. Our project doesn’t really fit in with the whole “design out crime” thing… but it’s meant to detect window scratching on buses, trains, shops etc through a piezo microphone and some signal processing.
Third was the No Climb Bin – explains itself really.
The most interesting discussion here was how to prevent all this behavior in the first place rather than just catching people as they do their naughty stuff.
#1 by Rebecca on February 10, 2009 - 5:44 pm
Some of the other entries, like ‘Brace Light’ (complete with own comic style demo) seem very novel, but possibly not feasible. What were the criteria for judging?
#2 by Rob on February 11, 2009 - 12:43 am
Nice. I didn’t know you were working on that. That’s actually really cool. I noticed the Today Tonight vid as well – your famous Wilson!! 😛
How are you liking WordPress? I’m actually working on WordPress at the moment, I’m close to rolling out my modified version of WordPress Mu for Curtin Uni.
#3 by wilson on February 12, 2009 - 2:15 pm
It looked like there were only 6 or so entries for this “award”. Most of them were students. I felt a little bad about being there getting awards for something I had *worked* on. Oh well 🙂
#4 by wilson on February 12, 2009 - 2:16 pm
WordPress seems good so far.
Any plugin suggestions?
#5 by Rob on February 20, 2009 - 10:31 am
Well I’m assuming you don’t need WP Super Cache, until your famous and everyone reads your blog!
WP-Simple-Tags seemed decent if you really want to get into tagging your posts and have cool tag clouds.
I can’t really think of any others of the top of my head, there are so many it’s ridiculous. If you have a need for something in particular search for a plugin and there probably is one 😛
By the way, the meta data says you have wordpress 2.0.12-alpha.
You should probably upgrade to 2.7 it’s pretty good from what I’ve seen, it will have heaps of security fixes and the admin tool is way better.
#6 by wilson on February 20, 2009 - 10:37 am
That’s quit a few versions behind. I blame Debian’s 2+ year release schedule 🙂
Must do a dist-upgrade now that lenny is out.