Liam Young from Tomorrows Thoughts Today will be at the Venice Biennale this week presenting at a series of events as part of Beyond Entropy: When Energy Becomes Form. He will be giving a lecture titled ROBOT MONSTERS at 6.00pm 26th august and participating in the symposium from 11am-11pm on 27th August. Other speakers include Ricardo de Ostos, Tobias Klien on the 26th and Stefano Boeri, Charles Jencks, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ricky Burdett and many more for the symposium. The event is held in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini located on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, across the Canal from St. Mark’s square. Then from 3.00pm on the 28th Liam will be giving a tour of the Australian and British pavilions at the biennale.

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 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).

If you’re in London this Wednesday 23rd September Liam Young will be speaking at the Launch for the first issue of the Bookazine Beyond: Short Stories on the Post Contemporary. The first volume is themed Scenarios and Speculations and includes contributions from Bruce Sterling, SuperStudio, Wes Jones, Aaron Betsky, Sam Jacob, Shumon Basar and many more. The event will begin with a presentation on Urban Fictions by Colin Fournier followed by a roundtable discussion with Liam Young, Sam Jacob and book editor Pedro Gadanho. (more…)

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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Futurology, future-casting or futurism (with a little ‘f’) used to be a serious business. Now it’s just become business. (more…)