Director, Glenn Lowry: In traveling the world to find objects for this exhibition, curator Paola Antonelli returned again and again to Schools of Design.
Curator, Paola Antonelli Schools are usually where experimentation thrives, where issues and needs are tackled very directly without thinking of the compromises that are needed on the market.
Design Against Crime, an initiative from the Central Saint Martin’s School in London, therefore, provides us with some of the most direct examples of how our fears, our everyday fears, can be assuaged.
Some of them have gone into actual production, for instance, a whole series of bags that are designed so as to minimize the risk of objects being stolen from the bags.
The Stop Thief! chairs are not yet into production, but in a way they're not truly products. What you see here are two examples of very famous chairs, the Jacobsen Chair Number Seven, and one of the Thonet Chairs, that are used all over the world in bars and restaurants. As you can see, they've been slightly modified in order to provide a more secure place for people's belongings, especially handbags.