The increase in knife crime across the UK is one of the most challenging issues the UK faces. Involving and connecting our communities to work together against the destructive violence of knife crime is the key aim of the SiP: KiJ exhibition and supported by this accompanying design symposium with its Glasgow focus.
As our community of makers, designers and artists, we are only too aware of our responsibility and ability to shape, inform and improve lives through education.

Welcome by Professor Stephen Bottomley
Curator talks by Profess Norman Cherry and Dauvit Alexander.
Panel discussion: Professor Ross Birrell (GSA Professor in Contemporary Art Practice & Critical Theory), the curators, Anna Gordon, Head of S&J GSA and Professor Alistair Fraser from the School of Social & Political Sciences at Glasgow University and Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.

We envisage this symposium contributing to discussions around a ‘public health’ approach supported by Scottish government policy, illustrating how design can transform policy ideas into practical applications.

The panel discussed the nationwide problem of knife crime and how artists and makers have created new bodies of work by refashioning, adapting or otherwise transforming knives surrendered to UK police, mainly through the West Midlands Police knife surrender scheme.

The symposium was a call to invite stakeholders from Glasgow, as the exhibition's local intervention, to come together in a creative arts environment to understand how creative practice can offer insights, reflections, and practical applications of government strategic aims related to criminal violence, particularly among young people.

Future planned work will be the development of a network meeting to explore future impact through a GSA Impact fund award (Feb 2025). The event was supported by Craft Scotland