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

How to Make (Almost) Anything — MIT

Everything on this page starts here. In 2008 I earned the Diploma in Digital Fabrication through the pilot run of Neil Gershenfeld’s How to Make (Almost) Anything class (MAS.863), offered by MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms — the class that later grew into Fab Academy. The work from that semester still lives on the CBA server, skateboard moulds and all.

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.