Concluding the first series of BIOfuture IG livestreamed sessions, at 18:00 BST on May 25th I'll be joined by Professor Claudia Pasquero and Maria Kuptsova to expand upon our two earlier BIOfutures conversations around how still emerging developments in fields including biosensing, biocomputing,  biodesign, biomaterials, and biofabrication are converging to open new ways to address critical environmental and social problems facing cities around the world. 

Prof. Claudia Pasquero is Professor & Head of Institute of Urban Design at the University of Innsbruck; Urban Morphogenesis Lab Director at The Bartlett, UCL; and Founding Director of ecoLogicStudio, among other current concerns. Maria Kuptsova is a Research Associate at Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck; Head of Design Innovation at ITMOTECH; and curator Curator of digitocene.net

Watch our live-streamed conversation next week here. 

​On May 19th, The Bartlett’s Assoc. Prof. Richard Beckett joined me in the conversation to discuss how advances in biodigital technologies, together with new insights into the microbiology of homes and cities might shape our future built environments. We delved into why new approaches and insights are enabling us to work with living systems in ways that might help us mitigate critical and complex environmental and social problems now and in the future. 
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A researcher and educator at the Bartlett, Richard’s work is focused on probiotic design, novel digital fabrication techniques, and new materials for microbial ecologies in buildings and cities. He is co-editor of the Syn.De.Bio forum ,which disseminates biodigital work at the crossroad of design, biology, and engineering, and promotes emerging talent in the field. His research on Probiotic Design won the RIBA Presidents Research Award in 2021. Richard has built numerous projects and has been exhibited internationally inc. Archilab – Naturalising Architecture, The Pompidou Centre and Nature – Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Hear the recording of our session here.

Living architecture pioneer Professor Rachel Armstrong joined me in conversation for the latest in the BIOfutures Instagram livestream series. A deep dive into the question of how living architectural materials, engineering, computing, and design might shape our future societies, our conversation explored the re-imagining of the city from the sub-atomic level upwards. We discussed how, by working with other species to create a multi-species commons, we could create solutions to foremost critical issues including resource shortages, pollution, and climate change, together with some of the challenges that face those taking a first principles approach to their research and practice, and why the transition to a truly sustainable society necessitates lateral changes such that policy and practice align with the parameters of the non-human world, both biotic and abiotic. Watch the recording of our conversation here.