Soft targets are often vibrant public spaces for leisure, celebration, education, and free expression, which makes them inherently vulnerable and undesirable or impossible to harden by conventional means. To achieve public security in an open, diverse, and democratic society, the Virtual Sentry must be integrated into the infrastructure and culture of the built environment. This project addresses a complex design problem at the intersection of human behavior and technology, that resists a single or prescriptive solution. This research will create new knowledge to assess the vulnerability of public spaces, design smart urban and architectural spaces that reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities, and integrate detection technology with human intelligence. Furthermore, this design research will include an integral study of the social and ethical dimensions of deploying deterrent and detection security systems to protect and sustain a thriving public realm.
Security in the public realm is a multifaceted problem, involving related and conflicting variables. This project uses design research methodologies to generate parameters and protocols for how the design of the built environment can create conducive contexts for a strategic deployment of the Virtual Sentry. Design research distinguishes itself from, and augments the capacity of, scientific research in critical ways. To generalize, scientific research establishes a hypothesis and sets a course of observation, investigation, experimentation, and analysis to objectively test if it is false. Design research relies on more heuristic processes to expediently test new variations and iterations of a design proposition that addresses multiple criteria. In this way, it produces multiple iterations of applicable solutions for real-world contexts.
This research engages users, designers, and managers of the built environment to define security problems that are specific to venues or venue types (e.g., schools, transportation facilities, sports facilities, etc.), understand their current best practices, and assess their vulnerability, in order to design smart urban and architectural public spaces that reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities and to integrate detection technology with human intelligence. The goal is to define an ethical theory for security design, a protocol for assessing environmental vulnerabilities of different venue types, and design guidelines with visual standards for design teams and venue owners or managers to adapt the Virtual Sentry to their context. This research will be greatly enhanced through collaborations with the SENTRY center’s team of experts on crowd behavior, crowd-aware computer-aided design, digital twin, advanced detection technologies, and decision-making at the full range of urban and architectural scales. By iteratively generating and testing physical and spatial configurations that negotiate parameters of human behavior, detection technologies, and specific cultural contexts, these studies will develop and refine the process and guidelines for the design and integration of existing and new spaces with the Virtual Sentry —a critical contribution to the other research activities and to the ultimate objectives of this DHS COE.
