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.