Application of creativity tools to enhance the design of inherently safer urban infrastructure
Creators: name: Yadrandji Aghdam, Sasan
Publisher: name: Imperial College London
Year: 2013

description: The purpose of this research is to explore the construction of a guideline for professionals who make decisions that affect the urban environmental security. The use of creativity tools has become widespread within design sectors but has not yet reached the domain of security design. The strategy here is to find and engage suitable creative idea generation methods that can be use to develop guideline for experts who ultimately used them in the process of designing secure urban infrastructure. In pursuing this goal, this thesis provides a guideline of the fundamental principles of using the application of creativity tools in the development of plausible ideas for crime prevention interventions. The advantage of using such a method or schema is the systematic sorting of potential design solutions. Depending on the criteria required, a design tool (creativity tools) will prompt an urban security engineer to consider potential security weaknesses within an urban design project and offer a wide range of potential solutions for problems. Crime is a social problem in our society that affects people’s lives. The challenge is how to generate more creative ideas to combat crime or how to engage creativity tools within security design to minimise the opportunities for crime to be committed. Existing research demonstrates that creative design in urban infrastructure can minimize the potential for crime in many cases (especially opportunistic crime). Our related research has generated a further host of solutions for potential crime-related problems extending to many areas of urban infrastructure design. The intention here is to demonstrate the implications of using this research within a context of devising creativity tools adequate to implement the results of these findings. Security auditing of urban environment threats and visual mapping of some current security weaknesses is the right approach advocated here to trace the factors behind each crime case. This thesis demonstrates that the use of visual mapping application (issue based information system (IBIS)) can effectively address the problem of data overloading and decision making in the crime prevention domain. The process of collecting data in crime prevention method can be challenging. The experts are usually able to trace one direction of crime cases at a time. The method conducted in this thesis can assist experts to see the full extent of a crime case at the same time. Therefore, they are more likely to be capable of finding the right reason behind a criminal activity. This thesis also further implements a specific approach which is developed for use on large complex security design problems. Visual mapping techniques can be a beneficial tool for security experts as argued in this thesis. It can help experts to understand and concentrate on causes of crime, as most cases of crime are interconnected puzzles and experts need to pay attention to details synergistically. For the development of creative ideas against crime, this thesis explores the outcome of a visual mapping model, and then describes the development of creative solutions for particular examples. The specific creativity tools (selected according to the nature of each crime) should be used in order to develop and generate a variety of solutions that can eliminate the opportunities for crime. The process ends when an appropriate form of creativity tool is decided upon for each crime case. A set of creative and innovative ideas was developed to deal with the diversity of potential crime generated by adaptive offenders. This thesis also indicates that a synthesis of creative idea generation methods within security design can represent a meaningful contribution towards effective design of secure urban infrastructure. Depending on the type of threat identified (again with the use of our methods), engineers can then use the particular creativity tools described, to generate several appropriate solutions for these threats. A web-based software program intended to help security engineers to understand and adapt these concepts in their design has also been developed.