Caracas → Barcelona → Bali
Cities should produce what they consume.
I’m an urbanist and technologist from Venezuela, living in Bali. My work is digital fabrication and what it does to cities and the people in them: when the means of production are distributed — a fab lab in a neighbourhood instead of a factory on another continent — who gets to make things changes, and so does what a city can become. I founded Fab Lab Barcelona, the first fab lab in the European Union; I chair the Fab City Foundation; and I co-founded Meaningful Design Group.
Locally productive, globally connected. Everything I do is a version of that sentence.
Now
Three things have most of my attention. Fab City is entering its second decade, which means the comfortable part is over: declaring that cities should make what they use was the easy half, and 2054 — the horizon we set ourselves — is not moving. Meaningful Design Group is the design strategy practice I co-founded here in Bali. And Bali itself is a live experiment, in daily life and in sound: I make music as TX, and it transmits from RXTX.
Selected work
- Fab City A global initiative to make cities locally productive and globally connected — production back inside the city, by 2054.
- Smart Citizen Open-source sensors that let citizens measure their own air, noise, and climate instead of waiting for an official number.
- Fablabs.io The online home of the global Fab Lab Network: more than 2,000 labs across 126 countries sharing knowledge, projects, and machines.