The Jury
A panel of reputed national and international experts will evaluate ideas and award winners.
Tomas Diez
Ladera is a Venezuela born Urbanist, Designer and Technologist who specializes in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society. He is a founding partner and executive director of the Fab City Foundation, as well as a member of the board of trustees of IAAC Foundation, where he also is a senior researcher and tutor. He is a close collaborator of the Fab Foundation, supporting the development of the Fab Lab Network worldwide, as well as taking a leading role in starting programs such as the Fab Academy, and Fab City. He has co-founded and co-designed the Smart Citizen project and the Fab Lab Network global platform called fablabs.io. Tomas has also co-created higher degree programs such as the Master in Design for Emergent Futures (IAAC-Elisava), and the Master in Design for Distributed Innovation (Fab City-IAAC), whose he also co-directs. He is a founding partner and Executive Director of the Meaningful Design Group Bali, a novel initiative that aims to intersect advanced technologies and design with alternative world views and cultures in Indonesia and South East Asia. He has been awarded as a young innovator of the year by the Catalan ICT Association and nominated by Nesta as one of the top 10 Social Innovators in Europe.
Kate Armstrong
Kate Armstrong sits on the Management Board of the Fab City Foundation, leading the global initiative's Outreach. A Master Arts and Society (University Utrecht) and Bachelor of Design (UNSW), Kate has vast experience in cultural programming, design and open tech fields in Australia and Europe. She has been communication and dissemination manager for various European research projects concerned with circular economy, open design innovation ecosystems and future cultural heritage. She managed the Distributed Design Platform, a Creative Europe Platform co-funded by the European Commission and currently serves as its strategic advisor. She is Faculty of the Master in Design for Emergent Futures at IAAC/ELISAVA, Faculty of the Master in Distributed Design and Innovation and Head of Programming for the Interspecies Internet global thinktank for interspecies communication.
Minh Man Nguyen
A civil engineer and architect who graduated from GeorgiaTech with a master in architecture, Minh Man Nguyen's primary focus is to explore the social impact of innovative technologies in the field of architecture and therefore at the scale of the city. He is a co-founder of the architecture office WAO which has been working with digital fabrication and computational design since 2010 at various scales from furniture to collective housing. In 2013, he co-founded WoMa, Fabrique de quartier, a coworking space combined with a Fablab which was labelled in 2015. WoMa has been very active member of the Fablab network. Together with Volumes it hosted the first fabacademy in Paris it is also a member of the French Network of Fablabs (RFF). He is a board member and former president of the Fab City Grand Paris association, which he co-founded in 2017. He led the Parisian consortium for a European H2020 project on the circular economy: REFLOW. He founded the Re-Store collective in 2019, a laboratory for solutions on wood reuse based in Saint Denis, composed of engineers, designers, craftsmen and real estate developers. He teaches architecture, complex geometry and digital fabrication in different universities in France since 2010. He is now a lecturer in the department Digital Matters at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture of Paris Malaquais.
Mai Nguyen
Mai is an interdisciplinary designer, and creative social entrepreneur, with a background in mechanical engineering from the National University of Singapore. Mai enjoys working at the intersection between arts, technology and social innovation, taking inspiration from nature, craftsmanship, indigenous materials and processes to create sustainable developments. This includes creating INGO - an educational woodblock printing kit to connect Vietnamese youth to a dwindling cultural heritage, co-founding FabLab Saigon at Toong Vista Verde and working with global organizations such as British Council, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and FabLabs network to support a circular future for the making and design sectors globally through collaborations with businesses, institutions and NGOs. Once she also enjoyed building robotic automation systems for ABB Robotics in Singapore for almost 4 years.
Luciano Betoldi
Luciano Betoldi has been involved in the Fab Lab Network since 2009, initially through his work at Fab Lab Barcelona and the Fab Academy program and most recently, by joining the Fab Foundation in 2016, where he continues to serve as Vice President and COO. Initially trained as a Product Designer at IED Barcelona and as an Interaction Designer at Elisava Design School, Luciano’s early work focused on the intersection of manufacturing and craft and the ongoing dialogue between them. Exploration of this theme inevitably led him discover digital fabrication and to the creation of projects such as the Made@EU platform, a collaborative educational platform focusing on the introduction of digital fabrication tools to craftspeople and artists across Europe and supported by the European Commission. Since joining the Fab Foundation, Luciano has worked towards democratizing access to digital fabrication tools and education by leading the Foundation’s deployment efforts, assisting in the creation of over 150 Fab Labs across the globe and providing operational support to a wide range of projects and initiatives.
Kalaya Kovidsith
Kalaya Kovidvisith is Co-founder of FabCafe Bangkok and Managing Director of FABLAB Thailand. She holds a Master degree in Design and Computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research interests focus on how digital fabrication and biotechnology reinforce the changing relationship in industry and create the new business model for the next design generation. Kalaya is Global Entrepreneur Summit Delegate of 2015 and Asia Pacific Weeks Berlin 2016.
Guillem Camprodon
Guillem Camprodon is a designer and technologist working on projects bridging emergent technologies and grassroots communities. He is the director of Fab Lab Barcelona, the first Fab Lab in the European Union and a benchmark in the network of over 1800 Fab Labs. Over the last ten years, he helped scale Fab Lab Barcelona from a digital fabrication facility into an established research and innovation laboratory. He led Smart Citizen, a platform that opposes the traditional top-down Smart City model, empowering communities with tools to understand their environment. Guillem worked as a researcher on many European-funded projects, including Making Sense, iSCAPE, GROW Observatory, Organicity, DECODE, ROMI, or Reflow. He is also a lecturer in multiple IAAC programs, primarily at the Master on Design For Emergent Futures (MDEF).
Jessica Guy
Jessica Guy is a designer and action researcher. Jessica’s work focuses on exploring participatory practices, community engagement and capacity-building activities in European research projects on a global and local scale. Jessica holds a Master degree in Design for Emergent Futures organised by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, in collaboration with the Fab Lab Barcelona and Fab Academy. In the past, Jessica successfully graduated as an Industrial Designer (BA) at the Munich University for Applied Sciences and participated in the acceleration programme X-Futures by Fab Lab Barcelona. At Fab Lab Barcelona, Jessica is leading the global activities of the Creative Europe project Distributed Design Platform and co-leading the Erasmus+ Project Makeademy educational programme. Furthermore, they are the Make Works worldwide coordinator and lead of Make Works Catalonia. Jessica has contributed as a researcher to the European-funded projects Pop-Machina, CENTRINNO and REFLOW.
Tom Trandt
Tom Trandt is a Vietnamese fashion designer who graduated from Parsons the New School for Design, New York in 2015. While still studying, his project was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Coming home in 2016, he founded Môi Điên - Vietnam-based fashion brand. Tom received Elle Magazine's Green Warrior of the Year Award 2019 and represented Vietnam at the International Fashion Showcase 2019 - a platform showcasing young fashion design talents from around the world. Given his influences on the contemporary fashion landscape, Tom appeared on the list of Forbes 30 Under 30 Vietnam in 2020. His designs are known for taking a fashion waste-to-value approach, and drawing inspiration from Vietnamese culture. His latest role is Art director of Hanoia.
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