Quiet Babylon is run by Tim Maly. I live in Providence RI. I make projects, write, and talk about our weird future. I used to be on Twitter @doingitwrong. You can email me at [email protected].

Making Projects

I work at Center for Complexity at Rhode Island School of Design. I was part of the team that co-founded Horizon 2045. At the CfC, I’m working on designing institutions suitable for managing catastrophic threats and providing care beyond stigma. A writer and critical designer, I teach in the Industrial Design program at RISD, helping students understand the role that communication plays in explaining and exploring ideas.

I’ve been a fellow at Harvard's metaLAB — my main interest related to material networks. With the Dredge Research Collaborative I was documenting monumental acts of unacknowledged landscape architecture. Emily Horne and I ran an independent design studio called Border Town. With Jacob Zimmer, I was the project coordinator for Upper Toronto, a utopian performance about cities. In September 2010, I curated 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

Writing

Emily and I wrote a book about panopticons called The Inspection House. I also freelance. I'm interested in surveillance, infrastructural landscapes, cyborgs, spimes, networked cities, haunted smart-homes, and drones. Previously, I ran two collections at Medium.com. One is called Thoughtful Design and it was about the small details of design. The other is called Weird Future and it was stranger. My favourite post from Thoughful Design is about the sound design of cars. My favourite post from Weird Future is a gonzo paranoid fantasy about the NSA. I was a founding staff writer at Wired Design. Our approach was that we were on the cusp of a new industrial revolution, built on rapid fabrication and mass customization. My favourite posts were about the processes and logistics chains behind it. I pioneered our coverage of materials. I'm particularly proud of this article about the techniques behind MapBox's Cloudless Atlas.

Talking

In the wake of the 2016 election, I tried to wrap my head around the value of prediction. I ran a two day event about doing strange things to museums called Enter Through the Gift Shop. We ran a DredgeFest symposium and boat tour at Studio-X in New York and then even longer ones in Louisiana, Duluth, and San Francisco. I defended impractical alternatives at Harvard's MetaLab. CBC's Spark interviewed me about hypnotizing computers. I argued that collaboration could be an artistic medium at Homework. I once gave a high speed talk about cyborgs at Ignite Toronto.