The leading language newspaper in Spanish “El País” interviews Tomás Díez, Director of IAAC’s Fab Lab Barcelona and the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF), on the impact of digital manufacturing tools and technologies on neighbourhoods and cities.

This new revolution, according to Díez, is changing the model of the city and the economies of societies towards more collaborative and circular systems, where citizens move from being a merely consumer agent to a producer and self-sufficient one. All this philosophy is embodied in the notion of Fab City, which envisions the fact of building a network of cities around the world that are locally productive and globally connected through open knowledge.

To carry out this mission, Tomás Díez highlights the fundamental role of Fab Labs (digital fabrication laboratories) in neighbourhoods, towns and cities in order to help citizens to build and produce almost anything, allowing them to transfer ideas, designs and projects from bits (digital world) to atoms (physical world) through 3D printing and similar technologies.

 

You can see the audiovisual interview below (in Spanish):