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?”

The work from the students of Liam Young (Tomorrows Thoughts Today) and Kate Davies’ (liquidfactory) design unit 7 ‘Necessary Monsters’ is being exhibited at the Architectural Associations projects review , 36 Bedford Sq London until July 25th.  (We are the glowing room just beyond the terrace) Those of you not in London can see the work by following the links to intermediate 7 in the online exhibition.  Read on for a full studio and project description.

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Tomorrows Thoughts Todays Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG are curating a symposium on Science Fiction and Architecture on May 29th 11am - 6pm. at the Architectural Association in London.

The event is free so come one come all. If you are outside of London the event will be streamed live online on the AA website.

Speakers include

Geoff Manaugh (Chair)
Journalist, Commentator, Author. Founder of blog BLDGBLOG
Vicktor Antonov
Art Director for game ‘Half Life 2’ and Production Designer for film ‘Rennaissance’.
Francois Roche and Stephanie Lavaux
R&Sie architects Paris.
Warren Ellis
Comic author. Creator of ‘Transmetropolitan’ and ‘Fell’, writer for Marvel and DC comics.
Ian Macleod
Science Fiction Novelist. Winner of 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction
Archigram- Peter Cook/Dennis Crompton
Seminal visionary architecture group
Squint Opera
Film and media production studio.
Jim Rossignol
Gaming author and journalist.
Nic Clear
Editor of ‘Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design’ and Bartlett U15 tutor

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Liam Young and Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be showing a selection of project prints at the FUTURE.city.past.FORWARD exhibition in the d3 gallery in Brooklyn New York from April 11 - May 3, 2009. The exhibition features work in art, architecture, interior design, industrial design, and graphics that expresses futurism at various scales and from emerging perspectives.

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A selection of pieces from the Specimens of Un Natural History project will be on show in the Spaces and Narrations exhibition in the Triangle Gallery at 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU. The exhibition will run from 9th March until the 13th March. For those of you not in London you can follow the work in the Slow Thoughts column. Update: More photos added below. (more…)

Liam Young from Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Kate Davies will be hosting a public lecture by designer Fiona Raby from dunne and Raby at the Architectural Association in London on Friday 20th February 6.00pm. (more…)

One from the ‘I must write about this but never got around to it pile’. An article in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal and on BBC looks at how a recent virus outbreak in the online game community World of Warcraft is being used as a research tool to study and predict the patterns of a real world pandemic. (more…)

Japan thinks the real world should be more like Gundam, the apocalyptic robot war series. Next year, a team of experts from all walks of life will join together to form the Gundam Academy, an academic institution dedicated to bringing humanity into the age of mecha suits, helper robots, and space colonization. It’s time for the Universal Century. (more…)

Nothing dates like images of the future. As a wide eyed child I remember sitting cross legged on the floor, with the flickering images of the Jetsons illuminating my saturady morning, thumbing through the pages of the Usborne books of the Future and the World of Tomorrow series. (more…)

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.