Tomas Diez, is a Venezuela born Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society. He is the founder of the Fab City Research Laboratory at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (http://www.iaac.net) where he also is tutor in design for digital fabrication. Tomas is tutor in Design Products at the Royal College of Arts, where he co-leads the Exploring Emergent Futures platform. He coordinates projects, events and programs at the Fab Foundation (http://www.fabfoundation.org), such as Fab City (http://www.fab.city), Fab Conferences and Fab Academy (http://www.fabacademy.org) worldwide.
He has participated in technological and social projects such as rehabilitation plans for marginal areas of Caracas, the Hyper-habitat installation for the XI Venice Architecture Biennale, the first solar house in Barcelona: the "Fab Lab House” for the Solar Decathlon Europe 2010 in Madrid, and the launch of Fab Labs in cities like Lima (Peru), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Ahmedabad (India), among other projects. Tomas co-funded in 2010 the programs "Fab Labs and Informalism" and "Smart Cities by Smart Citizens", both research agendas towards the use of ITC for the development of a citizen based platforms for the city production, which lead him to found the Smart Citizen project (http://www.smartcitizen.me) in collaboration with other partners through various crowdfunding campaigns and now part of different research projects within the European Union.
Now he is leading the Fab City Global Initiative together with partners at IAAC, the Fab Foundation and the Royal College of Arts. Tomas is co-founder of Studio P52 (http://www.studiop52.com), a creative space in the 22@ district of Barcelona.
His research focuses in understanding the relationship between machines and humans for the creation of a new economy based in distributed manufacturing infrastructure and data architecture through open platforms.