There is an interesting article on the BBC News [bbc.co.uk] about how things can be designed to deter theft. One of the examples they give is a chair that has slots cut in the seat so that a bag or a purse could be hung from it. The way that it prevents theft is by hanging the purse below the person's crotch. "'..the genital region is the most defended part of the body,' she says. 'If someone puts their hand down there, you notice.'"
I have often noticed that little thought is placed on theft-prevention. Has anyone noticed that the tables at the main library at Case Western Reserve University [case.edu] have no legs?
Two sides of the tables are huge panels that support the tabletop. The result is that there is no where to wrap a security cable around, in order to lock a laptop to something. With theft being such a huge problem in university environments, this is kind of a problem. Whenever I used the library there, I always locked my laptop to the arm of a chair, but that is obviously less secure.
I constantly run into these sorts of problems, which show how little people think about these sorts of problems.
Picture of the Kelvin Smith Library from Virtual Farm Boy's Flickr Photostream [flickr.com].
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