Reducing bag theft in bars
Paul Ekblom, KATE J. BOWERS, Lorraine Gamman, Aiden Sidebottom, Chris Thomas, Adam Thorpe, Marcus Willcocks · 2012
This chapter presents a detailed account of the considerations in designing a clip that fixes customers’ bags to tables in bars, to protect them against theft. On the face of this is a very simple idea, but in practice the factors that had to be addressed and resolved were many and complex and the designs had to be ‘high performance’. The account richly illustrates that complexity, and takes forward the process of bringing together design and crime science. In so doing it puts the Security Function Framework (Chapter 2: Ekblom) through its paces in capturing, organising and making sense of the knowledge from a major research project. This framework is an attempt to provide a structured approach to setting out the rationale of a design in terms of 4 discourses: Purpose (what is it for?), Niche (how does it relate to the rest of the security ‘ecosystem’?); Mechanism (how does it work?); and Technicality (how is it constructed and operated?).