The new thinking of the mid-to-late 1960s is most often expressed in pop culture, with vibrant colours and sounds. However, the exploration of new ways to think and to live went far beyond Sgt. Pepper and Axis: Bold as Love. Archigram is one of the most important architectural groups of that era, displaying completely new ideas of how to live and presenting them amongst a riot of sound, visual effects, and light. 50 years later, Archigram is still going strong, and we caught up with the group's Dennis Crompton at their new show at Modern Art Oxford to discuss its impact.

As the world becomes dominated by city dwellers and the dreams of living in space are ever-present, our relationship with the world around us is both intimate and detached. Isoculture is a project which dreams up an artificial "bubble" for us to live in – a self-enclosed environment where humans can flourish within hostile environments. Indeed, the reality of such hostility is moving into increasingly sharp focus due to man-made environmental damage.

The project is the brainchild of two artists, Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. We invited them to chat about their work.

Tim Maughan is well-known as a writer of science fiction, but you can leave any prejudices of the genre at the door. Maughan's work touches on topics including art, globalisation, architecture, activism, and the cult of celebrity. He is also an expert on Japanese anime and comics. We caught up with Tim at his home in Bristol, starting with a discussion about the recent film of his book, Paintwork.

Steve Furber's dream is to map the most intricate elements of the human brain in silicon form. Such an endeavour requires heavy-duty parallel computing, to which SpiNNaker, a project to map the brain through a massively parallel chipset. Ahead of his forthcoming talk at the Real Time Club on SpiNNaker, we caught up with Steve to find out where the project - and where parallel processing in general - is heading.