About

I’m from Venezuela. I studied urban planning and sociology at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, took a diploma in social work at the University of La Havana in Cuba, and moved to Barcelona for the Master in Advanced Architecture at IAAC. Somewhere along that route I stopped believing the future of cities was a zoning question and started believing it was a production question: who makes things, where, with what — and who gets left out.

That question has kept me inside fab lab culture and distributed manufacturing for more than fifteen years. I co-founded and directed Fab Lab Barcelona, the first fab lab in the European Union, and I’ve worked closely with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and the Fab Foundation to grow the global Fab Lab Network — the same network that now connects more than 2,000 labs in 126 countries through Fablabs.io. In 2014 we brought that whole world to Barcelona for FAB10, which I organized and co-chaired.

Along the way: The Guardian and Nesta named me among the top ten digital social innovators to watch in 2013; the Catalan ICT Association named me Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014; I’ve spoken at TEDxZwolle and at FAB24 in 2024; and I serve on the board of trustees of the IAAC Foundation. Lists like that are useful for introductions and useless for the actual work.

These days the center of gravity is the Fab City Foundation, whose board I chair, and Meaningful Design Group, the design strategy practice I co-founded in Bali. I live here with my wife, and I’m studying Ayurvedic health — slowly, which seems to be the point. I make music as TX; it transmits from RXTX.

Empowering people to make is the through-line. Everything else is scaffolding.