Tomas Diez

Research & teaching

Research & teaching

The lab was always a school in disguise. These are the programs we built once we admitted it — and the papers where the arguments got tested.

Programs

Master in Design for Emergent Futures (MDEF)

Design education kept asking students to render the future; MDEF asks them to prototype it and live with the consequences. I co-designed and co-directed it at IAAC, together with Elisava, in Barcelona — a master’s where the fab lab is not a facility but the curriculum.

Master in Design for Distributed Innovation (MDDI)

MDDI takes the same stance and distributes it: a program run between Fab City and IAAC, training people to design distributed innovation from inside the global network rather than from a handful of capitals.

Fab Academy

Fab Academy is digital fabrication taught the way the network works: one distributed program, directed by Neil Gershenfeld from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, running simultaneously in labs across the world. I played a key role in getting it launched, and Fab Lab Barcelona became a global coordination point for it.

Exploring Emergent Futures — Royal College of Art

In London, I worked on the Exploring Emergent Futures platform at the Royal College of Art.

Selected publications

500+ citations. The full list lives on Google Scholar.