At 2pm 29th June Liam Young will be speaking at the Futurising event in London. Chaired by Blueprint Magazine the event will be a gloves off showdown between online and print media in a battle for self publishing supremacy. Other panelists are Adrian Shaughnessy author of How To Be a Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul and Colin Davies, former editor of the Architects Journal. We will typically be ambiguosly falling between camps extolling the virtues of physical blogs.

On 16th March 9.30am Tomorrows Thoughts Today’s Liam Young will be speaking on Dystopias, ideal communities gone wrong and the end of the world at the SxSW ‘Design for the Dark Side’ panel. Other panelists are Jason Nunes screenwriter, author, interaction designer and a guy partly responsible for some of the best straight to video horror films to come out of the 1990s and Rachel Abrams- designer of technologically mediated experiences, writer, academic. The gig will be chaired by IDEO’s Ben Fullerton.

And so the blurb…

“Design usually focuses on making the world around us better - optimism often rules the roost in our industry. But what might happen if we forced ourselves to design for a catastrophic or dystopian future? Can we learn something by designing for a darker side of human experience?”

TTT is proud to be representing the cause of “Maximum Urbanism” at an upcoming conference in Cambridge University. Minimum… or Maximum Cities? will be exploring the past, present and future of urbanism and invoke the questions: Does the ‘minimum’ city provide a means to retrench, rethink and rebuild? Or is a ‘maximum’ urbanism the answer, based on expansive cities for a dynamic and globalised planet? Our session discussing the Future City (surprise surprise) will end the day and be chaired by Blueprint Editor Vicky Richardson. The conference is being run in conjunction with the Royal Academy’s Paper Cities exhibition and there will be a Paper Cities roadshow in Cambridge specially for the event.

The conference is being chaired by Alastair Donald, author of The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated.

Thursday 26th November, Departmnet of Architecture, Cambridge University.

Darryl Chen and Liam Young will be moderating a panel session at this year’s upcoming Festival of Urbanism, organized by the crew at This Is Not A Gateway. TTT will be joined by a cast of emerging and seasoned urbanists to discuss Productive Dystopia, or An Architecture of Unintended Consequences. Also on the panel will be Austin Williams (Future Cities Project); Karl Sharro (ManTowNHuman); Tomas Klassnik (Klassnik Corporation); Elena Pascolo and Alex Warnock-Smith (Urban Projects Bureau, Architectural Association); Finn Williams (Common Office); and Amin Taha (Amin Taha Architects). The night promises to be a lively one as we consider alternate ways of conceiving of the urban project beyond the blindly optimistic and optimistically futile. Spaces are free but with limited places on the night. 19.30 Friday Oct 23 Hanbury Hall, Spitalfields E1 6QR.

TINAG creates platforms for emerging academics, activists, human rights canvassers, artists, youth workers, filmmakers, architects, students and more, whose point of departure is the city.

Darryl Chen will be speaking at the Barbican next wednesday as part of a design workshop series with Studio AV. The workshops are embedded within the Futurological Congress - a three-day conference and exhibition of contemporary Polish architecture. Daniel Libeskind and Joseph Rykwert will give keynote talks (after TTT warms up the crowd).

We have been invited to exhibit The Specimens of Un Natural Histories project at the upcoming DesignCinema Exhibition in Istanbul. The exhibition and accompanying conference will run from the mid till the end of November. On display will be drawings and photographs of a range of specimens. If you cant make it to istanbul then cast your eyes across to the slow thoughts column where you can see the project immortalised in blog form.

 Tomorrows Thoughts Today just presented a paper at the Royal Geographical Society’s Annual Conference. The paper was titled Retrofitting Suburbia: Navigating from the Generic to the Specific and is part of a larger provocative exploration into the consequences of the sustainable suburb model. With thanks to Richard Gatti who kindly read the paper while TTT was stretched across Asia on other projects. The conference programme can be found here.