Joan-Anton Benach. Photo: Pere Virgili

Joan-Anton Benach (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1936) was the founding editor of the magazine, whose original name was Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània. It was founded in May 1986, when the city was preparing and reinventing itself to host the 1992 Olympic Games. Adopting the promotional slogan of “Barcelona, more than ever” devised by the City Council, the magazine chronicled the profound changes that the city underwent. Benach retired from the City Council in in 2007, but remains very active. In fact, he arrived to this interview on his motorbike. He is a theatre critic for La Vanguardia and works every day in his office. While we were talking in a bar in the Eixample district, he received three calls on his mobile phone.

How did Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània come about?

It was the realisation of an old proposal. Several journalists about my age had submitted a proposal that got tabled. Pasqual Maragall asked me to revise and update it. I was head of the City Council’s Cultural Affairs Department between 1979 and 1983, the time of the first democratic city council, and the idea of starting a magazine had always been there on the back burner. Between 1983 and 1985 I became fully involved in an exhibition on the industrial archaeology of Catalonia entitled “Catalonia, Spain’s factory”, which we did in conjunction with Economic History Professor Jordi Nadal. I participated as the curator, and we worked for almost two years to fill in 8,400 square metres of the El Born Market. After the exhibition, in late 1985, I was finally able to focus on the magazine proposal.

It was conceived as a cultural publication. Where did its name come from?

From the chatter that could be heard at that time about the reality of the metropolitan area. Pasqual Maragall’s Barcelona was very much based on the idea that the city should expand beyond its official municipal boundaries to become a full-blown metropolitan area. And including the adjective “mediterrània” (Mediterranean) was my idea. Some thought the “Mediterranean” concept was a bit naive, but we moved forward.

How was the magazine distributed?

The first distribution strategy failed. I couldn’t find anyone willing to offer selective distribution. A publication like that needed to be sold in about 20 kiosks, as it was targeted at specific sectors. We negotiated with some publishers but couldn’t make anything happen. We eventually signed an exclusive contract with an advertising agency that committed to distributing the magazine in exchange for us managing its advertising. We ran adverts for a period of time, but then the agency began to delay payments and ended up owing money to the City Council. Fortunately, this did not affect the magazine, which continued to operate normally. And then it began to be distributed, as it is to this day, through massive mailings.

As the magazine’s present editor, I have never had the misfortunate of having my articles censored or being pressed into covering a particular topic. Did you ever receive pressure from anyone?

No, councilmembers may have asked to write something, but I never allowed politicians to contribute. Councilmembers would say: “Benach won’t let me write”. And I would add: “Won’t ever”. I already had many years of experience and many councilmembers were good friends of mine from before the time I ran the Cultural Affairs Department – from my time as a journalist at El Correo Catalán. I also had another advantage, which was that Pasqual Maragall championed the publication’s independence. Sometimes a councilmember would complain about an article that had been critical of the City Council, but I liked the fact that the council’s policies could be criticised in the pages of Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània. It gave us credibility. I never had problems in this regard. Maragall also defended the magazine from budget cuts that came with a new manager. Maragall gave the magazine his ironclad support and always stood up for it.

You say that articles written by councilmembers were not accepted, but the mayor did write editorials and sometimes programmatic articles were published, as in the case of issue 37, which ran a very long letter from Maragall to Jordi Pujol and Felipe González. Maybe that was the only time the rule was broken.

Yes, it was the only time. But the focus was on the status of culture in Barcelona at the time. We were running a monographic supplement at that time which explored a particular topic in depth. The supplement on theatre, for example, is still very useful as a kind of “who’s who” and “what’s what” for theatre in the city of Barcelona. These supplements were published separately. And in some cases, like the one we devoted to the 1888 Universal Exposition, it served as a catalogue of the expositions for the 100th year anniversary. Robert Hughes, the Australian writer and art critic, wrote a reference book on Barcelona in which he often quoted the magazine. He combed through every issue of Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània in English and drew upon them extensively.

Hughes’ book was important during the Olympic period. Thirty years on, how do you look back on that Barcelona, the one that was just waking up and beginning to reinvent itself with the enthusiasm and innocence of those times?

It’s been thirty years! I look back on a highly improvised dynamic. From 1985 to 1992, the magazine’s driving theme was the Olympics and all efforts were aimed in that direction. Today, the opinion and leadership groups in Barcelona are much more heterogeneous than they were then, especially in the field of culture. There was a particular notion about the direction in which the city should move. I see it now as being more multifaceted, more diffuse, more broken up, especially after the 15-M anti-austerity movement. My impression as a Barcelonian is that there are many pans in the fire and it’s hard to know what to serve as the main dish. This should be a good thing, because there are many new things on the horizon of this European city. I like Ada Colau because she applies her municipal management capabilities to everything, and especially to problems. When she says “Let the refugees come!” she is really putting herself out there. As well as that, the city is doing fantastically well in a range of areas.

Joan-Anton Benach. Photo: Pere Virgili

And after having spent so many years in the Cultural Affairs Department, what differences do you see in the way things were managed then as compared to now?

Then there was confidence in the city’s cultural management, but Barcelona’s culture was much more difficult to manage. I suffered from the non-existence of the Cultural Institute of Barcelona (ICUB), because the department could not generate its own revenue; all our revenue went into the City Council’s general coffers. We organised a presentation about Ramon Casas which generated plenty of money. It was successful. It always had long queues, and its run was extended several times. Cultural Affairs did not receive a penny of that revenue. The same thing happened with the Grec theatre festival. I managed the Grec festival four times, but we had to pretend that the City made the theatre available to certain companies, because Cultural Affairs could not charge anything on its own.

Prior to joining the City Council you spent many years at El Correo Catalán, where you came into your own as a journalist.

When I got the idea for Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània, I was motivated more by curiosity about cultural issues than my experience as a journalist. Newspapers have a different dynamic. At El Correo Catalán, I edited the cultural section for many years before becoming editor-in-chief. We had to come out with a newspaper every day, which was very different to producing a magazine. I had been specialising in local policy issues and wrote a daily column, in which I was highly critical of the municipal policies of then mayor Josep Maria de Porcioles. And one got censored. Censorship cast a long shadow; the censor kept your articles. One day, an officer from the Barcelona delegation of the Ministry of Information and Tourism showed me my file, which was quite thick. Other colleagues of mine, such as Josep Pernau, had files that were even thicker. As a member of my then current party CC (first called Crist Catalunya, then later Comunitat Catalana, before becoming secular and changing its name to Força Socialista Federal, FSF, when Pujol was sent to prison), I was editor of the magazine Promos. That job earned me a fine and a disciplinary proceeding. Manuel Fraga closed it and wanted to send me to prison. The Press Act was enacted to exercise control over all news and journalistic activities. They abolished Signo, a Catholic magazine with a high circulation; they also closed down a communist magazine in Valencia. Eventually the ministry blackballed me. In 1966, leaning on the Press Act, Fraga told the editor of El Correo Catalán that I could no longer write any articles that were not about culture, and hence I was exiled to the cultural section. They also blackballed Casimir Martí and Joan Fuster. I was in good company.

Culture as something innocuous.

Exactly. Culture seen as something harmless. And even then, they censored many of my theatre reviews.

Under your editorship, the magazine had a couple of very clear phases when the focus was on major events in the city. First the Olympics and then the 2004 Forum.

I think the Forum stage was a bit murky. From the urban planning perspective, it made sense and worked, but it didn’t fit in well with the city or with the people. The city’s current pulse is something that I understand very intuitively. It’s a city that has supported cultural events such as Sónar and Primavera Sound, which were targeted at specific groups. I also notice the lack of a thorough approach to tourism, and particularly to heritage tourism. There is now a dynamic of taking things as they come, because the demand is there, but what we really need is quality tourism. La Rambla has been hijacked and we don’t seem to mind that much. We need to systematically reflect on the way Barcelona should react to this unstoppable surge in tourism, which has come on rather suddenly, like an avalanche.

Recent issues have featured some highly critical articles.

The cultural map that is emerging from this magazine is not at all bad. As I said, the aim had always been to develop the cultural sphere. As Cultural Affairs Director I oversaw twenty-four museums and the municipal orchestra’s musicians; a staff of five hundred were under my charge.

You were the ones running the show.

At that time the job of councilmember was an elected position, but they didn’t work as much as they do now. Department directors, in contrast, were treated as “illustrious” individuals; that’s why I always said that my funeral would be paid for by the City Council. It was actually very hard work, something which needed to be explained to be understood. We made a museum map. We saw the need for a section where we could present, in a very specific way, the best pieces from the museums. We gave special attention to the city’s museums as part of the effort to create a heritage inventory. But we also emphasised photography, design and literature. We also wanted to include urban planning and architecture as important aspects of Barcelona’s culture. Oriol Bohigas had a particularly positive attitude towards the magazine and gave us lots of support.

In this regard, the special supplements filled a need not met by other magazines and media outlets.

They were so successful that in some cases we reissued them separately.

Today there is a raft of cultural magazines out there, mainly online, but things were different then.

That worried me. I don’t think that Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània could have been compared with any other magazine at the time. There was one that I considered reprehensible and which I had to distance myself from as an example of what the City Council should not have done. Its name was San Jorge, published by the Barcelona Provincial Council, in Spanish. That was when everything was done in Spanish. It was a magazine for staff members filled with photos of inaugurations and political “posers”. Barcelona. Metròpolis Mediterrània didn’t compete with other media outlets and was well received by the newspapers.

Did you hold any public events related to the magazine?

Yes, when a new issue came out we often invited journalists to a breakfast and held a press conference in one of those majestic rooms at the City Hall, with white-gloved porters. Journalists did show up for those breakfasts, needless to say.

That would be unthinkable today.

When I retired in 2007, they threw me a farewell party at the City Hall. A great many people from the world of culture were there, everyone who had contributed to the magazine. I have very good memories of that.

Growing numbers of people live in cities and are increasingly connected, but only productive societies will be able to decide their future. A plan has been implemented in Barcelona to place technology within everybody’s reach, allowing the community to work together.

© Pere Virgili
From left to right, Vicente Guallart, Chief Architect of the City Council and founder of the Barcelona network of fab labs, and Neil A. Gershenfeld, professor at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the Center for Bits and Atoms.

Neil A. Gershenfeld is a professor at MIT and the head of the Center for Bits and Atoms at the same technological institute, a sister lab to the MIT Media Lab. His research studies are predominantly focused in interdisciplinary studies involving physics and computer science, in such fields as quantum computing, nanotechnology, and personal fabrication. Gershenfeld is one of the most prominent advocates of the notion of personal fabrication and has been an inspiration for many scientists and engineers working in fab labs today across the globe.

Vicente Guallart, for his part, is the Architect in Chief of the City of Barcelona and the founder of Barcelona’s network of fab labs. Guallart is the author of The Self-Sufficient City (Actar Publishers, 2012), a luminous book on the future of the city, reviewed in this issue of Barcelona Metròpolis. We have interviewed them during the 10th International Fab Labs Conference and Fab Festival, celebrated in Barcelona.

Mr Gershenfeld, you claim that the digital revolution has not come out yet to the physical world. We are going now from programming bits to programming atoms. We have reached the first stage of the digital revolution, but we have yet to move to another level. Where are we now?

Neil A. Gershenfeld: There is a very precise historical analogy that shows where we are now. As computers evolved, we first had mainframe computers, followed by a secondary stage with mini computers, and after that came the ‘hobby’ computer, and finally the personal computer. So that was the history of digitising communication and computation. We are retracing that history now for fabrication in different stages, so in an initial stage you would have the main frames of fabrication, that is, the big machines and factories. We are in the minicomputer era of digital fabrication.

So the fab labs work today like the minicomputers, and the minicomputers were the moment in history when the Internet was invented. Now fab labs are working on machines that make machines, so fab labs make fab labs (those were the hobby computers) and the research we are doing is leading up to the personal fabricator. That is still a research project – one machine that can make anything – but the historical lesson is: You didn’t have to wait 20 years from the invention of the PC before you could start using the internet. So the revolution is here today. There are still many years to work on the technology, but the revolution has already arrived.

Mr Guallart, in your book The Self-Sufficient City, you make a striking assertion: “The Internet has changed our lives but it hasn’t changed our cities, yet.” How will the digital revolution change the way we live now?

Vicente Guallart: The architecture of cities is the last to change when society undergoes a transformation such as the one we are experiencing now. We usually build our idea of society according to the technologies we have at hand at a given time and place. In the 21st century we are all globally connected, and thanks to the Internet we have gained access to all sorts of information generated around the world. This information will enable us to produce our own goods in a self-sufficient way. We are not there yet, but we will be able to produce locally only if we are globally connected. So, we sense that a big change is looming on the horizon but it hasn’t happened yet. We see that we live in a different way and use technologies in a new way, but the way that cities work with the idea of fabrications, the way we produce food, the way we recycle materials… All these point to a larger change, so we are waiting to see the technologies that will transform our cities. For now, we can see that the way we move around and the way we produce energy is going to change in the near future.

N.G.: Today our cities import goods and produce trash that we can only partially recycle. We are still immersed in the PITO model (Product In, Trash Out) but we are moving towards a new model in which the flow of information will be the key. The DIDO model (Data In, Data Out) will enable information to flow so that production can be based locally. If we decrease the flow of matter, the flow of information will increase.

How is this change going to come about?

V.G.: In the city of the near future, all houses and businesses will necessarily be connected to the Internet. The city of the future should be a metropolis of neighbourhoods, where everybody should be able to walk to work or have a bakery or a swimming pool or a fab lab within walking distance. Barcelona is implementing a plan to have a fab lab for every district and thus create a public network of fab labs in order to make technology accessible to everyone.

It has been said that the first fab lab at MIT appeared as if by accident. How did it come about?

N.G.: From CBA and MIT the answer is very narrow. We had a big grant from the National Science Foundation and they asked us to show the social impact of the research and we had no idea, so we just set up a lab as a requirement for the grant, and then they have been doubling it for ten years since. Barcelona has been one of the earliest and biggest and most important labs for this history because the city has a fabulous tradition of design and 50% youth unemployment. There is this great knowledge base, and then there is this broken economy. What is happening here in fab labs in Barcelona and in this international meeting is really profound – it is actually creating a new economy that challenges the fundamental assumptions about how the economy works and so on, all over the world, and Barcelona is a real leader in this. Digital fabrication leads to personal fabrication, which is leading to a new economy.

Vicente, how has the MIT lab shaped Barcelona’s fab lab? What sort of inspiration…

N.G.: Well, let me correct the question. We started it at MIT, but Barcelona’s lab is bigger than MIT’s. The notion of fab labs has been invented by the world. MIT was a little seed and we are still involved, but what goes on in fab labs is the result of a global community collaboration.

V.G.: In our case, Neil has always said that MIT is a safe place for strange people. So we are some of those strange people that engaged in thinking how to invent the future. I have some previous experience with digital production, but we realised that if we were not able to work in collaboration with other people, we would never be able to produce anything and would be reduced to consumers. We created our lab, and our Master of Advanced Architecture arose when we could work with Neil to create the Media House Project together. The idea of a fab lab is having a community with which you can share ideas and solutions while you use the same kind of technology, and from that point of view we are trying to learn as much as we can from MIT. We come from the Cistercian tradition, which springs from the Middle Ages, when monasteries replicated each other. We decided to replicate ourselves in other laboratories, here in Barcelona, but also in Lima and Addis Ababa, so we can become a kind of proactive partner with the fab academy in order to make the revolution possible.

Fab labs in Africa. Valentina, an 8-year-old girl in rural Ghana, can do something by herself that we currently need different people to assemble… Now three students at MIT are scaling innovation done by an 8-year-old in Africa…

N.G.: The bigger lesson is not the students at MIT, which after all fits a few thousand people. They are bright and inventive, but they are only a few thousand, whereas in the planet there are a few billion. What is driving the lab story is that you find exactly the kind of profile of bright inventive people in rural African villages or above the Arctic Circle. The existing advanced education industry does not reach the brain power of the planet. So it’s not changing MIT, but scaling MIT. We are finding people all over the world but there is no place for them, and this is the gap fab labs are trying to fill.

So what can fab labs do for democracy today?

V.G.: We are in a global crisis that affects both the way we work and the way we organise ourselves. We are moving towards a world in which people will live mostly in cities and will be more and more connected, but in the future only the countries and cities that are productive will be able decide their own future. This is why the city of Barcelona has decided to create a plan similar to the one that was developed 100 years ago with the libraries. Recently I was at the Boston Public Library, and at the entrance there is a motto that says “FREE TO ALL”, which is an invitation to open the knowledge of academics to all citizens. Until now, technology was closed to universities and we have decided to open it to everyone. This is why in Barcelona we are developing a plan to set up a laboratory in each district in the same way that we have libraries, schools, health centres, etc. We work to make technology accessible to everyone, we create a network that allows the community to work together… and this is fundamental to grant people the right to decide their future for themselves. Today many people are calling for a revolution, but we are already making a revolution, empowering the citizens, allowing them to have the tools to connect with other people and to share knowledge. We also want to empower cities, because often cities have collapsed, not only economically but also intellectually when confronted with the question, “What to do next?” In the 50s, after the Second World War, the economy was being pushed forward by democracy, mostly in America, and we were all growing together. Today, though, the money is coming from places that are not very democratic, like China or Russia or the Middle East… so we need to invent other ways to manage the economy in order to empower and to connect economic growth to democracy.

What are the current main obstacles that make cities resistant to change, or contrary to the emergence of new cities? It seems that the logic of big companies is that people are meant to consume rather than to create technology…

N.G.: No, that’s not exactly the problem. Remember that when the personal computer appeared, the leading computer companies all failed because they considered PCs a toy; they did not see them as a threat. In the same way, big government or big business are not threatened because they see fab labs as toys; they don’t understand them. The biggest challenge for fab labs is not confrontation but organization: building an organisational capacity. What Vicente and his colleagues have done is profound. They have essentially taken over running the city to build that capacity. There aren’t direct obstacles… The hard part is to build the organisational capacity to support this revolution. So we had to spin off a fab foundation and a fab academy to help support this growing network, and projects like the one Vicente is leading in Barcelona are building the civic infrastructure. It’s a real invention: he is inventing new ways to organise the city around a new notion of infrastructure. And so that’s the limitation, sort of inventing a new city, because if anybody can make anything, how can you live, work and play?

In an article published in Foreign Affairs in 2012, you said that the hype for 3D printers can be compared with the interest that newspapers showed for the microwave oven in the 50s, when it was seen as a substitute for cooking. Now we know that microwave ovens have improved our lives, but that we still need the rest of the utensils to cook. The fab labs would be the kitchen and the microwaves would just be the 3D printers.

N.G.: The research we are doing at my lab at MIT is to take all the tools in a fab lab and merge them in a very deep way, fundamentally structuring the properties of materials. Today, in a fab lab like the Architecture Institute in Barcelona, the 3D printer may actually be the least-used tool. There are bigger machines that involve much more complex processes. Right now there is a bit of hype in the media about 3D printers, but it is silly because the articles  are written by journalists who don’t even actually use them. There is a revolution today, which is digital fabrication, which means turning data into things and things into data, and the 3D printer is a small corner of that big space.

In Barcelona we have marked 300 years since the siege. You might have seen the show M.U.R.S. by La Fura dels Baus. The idea of the siege is relevant to the rise of fab labs, since you aim to create cities that become more self-sufficient, as Vicente Guallart’s book title points out. If we are to be under siege, we should be prepared to produce our own goods…

V.G.: The original title for the book was The Connected Self-Sufficient City. The ideal is not to be isolated. The way we are connected with others is different from the way we were in the past. The question is to empower local production. Basically because we must do it in order to be leaders of our future, but we will only be able to do this if we are connected to the world.

N.G.: Barcelona is under siege today. The economy is broken; people far away take your money and your jobs. You are under siege. It’s today.

How do you envision the city of the future?

N.G.: Think globally, fabricate locally.

V.G.: The city of the future will be multi-scalar, because the city of the future will be a network of cities. We will all be connected, and this implies that we will live in different places at the same time somehow. The city of the future is a metropolis of neighbourhoods. The future is not having a rich centre and a poor periphery, but a city in which many neighbourhoods are empowered and have the right facilities in order to be able to produce nearly everything.

How many things are you wearing that you have produced yourself?

N.G.: When you came to this interview I was working on the internals of the software that controls the machines that make machines – the engineering processes. One of the things that most excites me is the workflows, so I am wearing this laptop. The software in here is what I make. I am more interested in the workflows in the lab rather than the products of the lab. So that’s what I wear.

And you Vicente, what are you wearing that you have produced yourself?

V.G.: What I wear is myself…

N.G. (interrupting): No, no, I can answer for you. It’s the city. Look at this hall, look at Barcelona full of fab labs. I think the answer for Vicente is he is wearing Barcelona.

Carme Torras is a research professor at the Robotics Institute, where she leads research into perception and manipulation. As well as her scientific career, Torras has written a unique work of literature. She is the author of La mutació sentimental, which won the Premi de Ciència-Ficció Manuel de Pedrolo 2007.

© Pere Virgili

You are one of the best-known researchers in robotics in Europe, a relatively new field. How did you get into this discipline?

Once I finished my degree I started working in a multinational, but I was more motivated by research and wanted to keep learning. Thanks to a Fulbright scholarship I was able to study at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At that time what interested me most was the brain, artificial intelligence. At Amherst I focused on brain modelling, and Professor Michael Arbib was my supervisor for my Master’s thesis.

And what was the focus of that thesis?

I studied neuronal modelling. We worked with neurologists from the Ramon y Cajal Hospital in Madrid. Specifically, I modelled the nervous system of a crayfish. With very few neurones you can model learning, on both the physical and chemical level. The aim of my research then was to understand how we learn, how the brain acquires knowledge.

It cannot have been easy to follow this line of research.

It was difficult, because it needed a lab that we did not have. I started to look at artificial intelligence and robotics. At that time the Robotics Institute, which had been founded by Gabriel Ferraté, was known as the Cybernetics Institute, and was a joint centre between the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), the two institutions for which I work. Currently the institute has four fields of research. First, there is robot kinematics and design, the closest to mechanics. Second there are mobile robots, focusing on urban outdoor robots. Then there is process control, which deals with water distribution, electricity grids, fuel cells, etc. And finally, there is perception and manipulation, the group which I direct. Initially I worked on the kinematics and programming of industrial robots. Now, instead, I look at cognitive robotics with social applications.

What does cognitive robotics consist of exactly?

In the application of artificial intelligence techniques to robotics. And it sets out to mechanise in a robot actions that humans do naturally, like task scheduling or the perception and manipulation of objects.

What do you understand by perception and manipulation?

We mean that the robot has to be able to make itself a good representation of the environment and the user. We work in a domestic environment, in robotics for care and ser­vices. This has very different determining factors from industrial robotics. First, the robots that move in human environments must be safer; they cannot make sudden movements that could pose a danger to the user. Secondly, a non-expert must be able to programme them. For example, the person can teach the robot how to beat an egg with a simple demonstration, and the robot must be capable, thanks to cameras inside it, of acquiring this information and learning the basic skills necessary.

Have you created a robot that can cook our dinner?

The cooking robot is still at the research stage. Not long ago we carried out a European project, called Paco-Plus, where we managed to get a robot to clear the table and put the plates in the dishwasher. It was not intended to be transferred to the private sector, but it involved up to nine research centres.

Was it an international project?

Yes, we are completely integrated into the international robotics community. Recently, we have participated in three European projects in the field of cognitive systems. The Paco-Plus project, directed by the University of Karlsruhe, involved groups from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK and Slovenia. The GARNICS project, also headed up by a German group, was aimed at creating a robot gardener capable of taking samples in big plantations to optimise the yield. And the goal of the current IntellAct project, an acronym for Intelligent Action, is to teach robots to carry out simple manipulation tasks simply by doing them in front of them and correcting them when the reproduction by imitation is not quite right, just as you would with someone who was learning.

Could domestic robots have feelings?

There are people who work on giving cognitive robots emotions, to make them more sociable and friendly. For example, in Japan they are already working on various robot carers that can look after elderly people or children, something that I question. It is good that robots can expand our capabilities, but I do not like the idea that they are used as baby-sitters. In the long term it could be harmful if children have robots as slaves, and are not obliged to negotiate as they would when playing with other children. How will they learn empathy if they do not have someone in front of them who responds emotionally?

What kind of robots should children have, then?

A robot, to a greater or lesser degree, can affect the development of a child’s interpersonal relationships. A child who only plays with a robot will not have the emotional feedback needed to generate empathy. We learn emotions by seeing them in others. In the end, as Robert C. Solomon says, the relationships that we build are those that in turn shape us.

But it is also true that robots or games can stimulate multitasking [the ability to execute different tasks simultaneously], an ability that is well-developed in the younger generations, but which is detrimental to the ability to concentrate, because they are ready for a thousand stimuli at the same time. It is a vital attitude that trains the sensory motor skills, the driving reflexes, stimulus response, but which decreases the capacity to concentrate deeply on a problem. You see this, too, in the new generations of researchers: the machines generate such precise graphs and the algorithms give such automatic responses that often the researchers lose the physical sense of what they are doing.

Today people are still more dangerous than robots.

The danger is not that the robots will become more human and attack us, but that humans become robots, that they limit their actions to the simulated world inhabited by robots. Robots should increase the abilities of people and give us more autonomy, instead of decreasing it.

In your book La mutació sentimental, set at the beginning of the 22nd century, there is a robot that has a creativity prosthesis, designed to challenge the user and stimulate their wits.

What we must ask ourselves is whether we want robots to do the work and sideline humans or, conversely, if we want robots that will stimulate us and make us grow as people. “Spoiled robots make spoiled people, robots slaves make tyrants and robot entertainers remove the brains of their owners,” says a character in the novel. We should have an opinion as to what kind of robots we want, otherwise we will have no control over what we get sold. We have to start to think differently about the use and the point of robots.

Machines are changing our cognitive capacities and it is important to be aware of this to decide which capabilities we want to have. We cannot easily control our reaction to stimuli, but we can pick and choose which stimuli we want to receive and for which we want robots to be designed. And in this, society has a lot to say, because companies will sell what they want to, and the users must know how to discern what really suits them, whether we are talking about a doll or a butler.

A lot of education will be necessary to develop this awareness.

Yes, I started to write La mutació sentimental exactly for that reason. There are scientists who still aspire to creating a fully autonomous robot, not dependent on humans and capable of organising itself and setting its own goals; they even make robots with bodies programmed to keep growing. I see no sense in encouraging this kind of experiment without asking ourselves what will happen afterwards. In other words, there are those who think we will not have a fully developed artificial intelligence until we have created completely autonomous systems. I, on the other hand, think that robots should serve people. For me it makes more sense, for example, to design robot doctors who are capable of carrying out surgical procedures with more precision than us, than inventing a robot that has its own goals.

All this raises fascinating ethical questions. Just as overcoming the limits of biology has given rise to bioethics, in your field there is now roboethics…

Yes, more and more researchers are becoming interested in the subject, and the potential users are also paying more attention to it. At the previous robotics world congress there was a session open to the general public, dedicated to human–robot confluence. It was a very enriching experience contrasting very varied viewpoints.

What limits can we impose on the entertainment industry in the development of robots and humanoids?

I often use the example of Tamagotchis, devices which for a time were all the rage among kids. They were like living things, which needed feeding every day so they did not die. Tamagotchis were a hit and sold loads, but for me they are a clear example of an artefact that gives us nothing and creates a useless dependence. On the other hand, there are educational robots that many schools have integrated into the curriculum. At the moment, they are holding the First Lego League, for example, a worldwide competition for children aged between six and nine and ten and sixteen. It is a team competition. Some do the design, others programme and some take care of the sensory aspect. With these robots we can provide examples for explaining physics or math­ematics. Last year three Catalan girls trained in our workshops won an international prize.

Who formulates the discourses that feed roboethics? It is an open debate or restricted to engineers?

On the contrary, it is more important now than ever to open the debate to other disciplines. Like I said before, at the previous robotics world congress, in Karlsruhe, there was a forum entitled Robotics Meets the Humanities. At the table were two robotics professors, two from humanities, a philosopher, a science fiction filmmaker, there was Marcel·lí Antúnez as a performing artist who uses robotic technology, and I was the moderator. The robotics community has already glimpsed the need to draw up possible future scenarios, which give us ideas for research and enable us to assess whether they are feasible and where they will take us on a human level.

Do you think autonomous systems should have rights…?

There is not much sense in conceding rights if they have to serve people. Instead they should have obligations. What does need legislating is, if a robot harms someone, who is responsible? The engineer who designed it? The company that sold it? The person who was using it? Think about drones, military robots.

Can we talk about military roboethics?

A friend from NASA explained to me that there are already veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who fought using remote control drones. In combat their emotional involvement was not as intense as if they had been on the battlefield, but they suffer anxiety attacks and end up having psychological problems as serious as those of Vietnam veterans. If a military offensive is trusted to robots, knowing that they may impose limits, it would probably limit the scope of the destruction, provided that both sides rely on robots and they attack each other, of course. There is much to talk about here…

What role will robotics have in the smart cities of the future?

Robots will be useful for doing all kinds of tasks. We have sensors in waste containers that tell us when they are full, for example. Rubbish collection will be robotised. Lots of other infrastructures will also work autonomously. There is a project called Roboearth that consists of making an internet for robots, so that each of them can add their expertise and knowledge into a central system, a data cloud. Then a robot can go somewhere and know exactly where all the devices it has to use are, even the first time it sets foot there, because it will have access to all the information that has been modelled. We are also in contact with Barcelona City Lab. Here we have The Humanoid Lab, a workshop for university students to start programming robots.

How do you see Barcelona in the field of smart cities? Do you think it is high in the rankings?

Yes, very. Our institute took part in URUS, a pioneering project on the development of robots that guide users around urban environments. It was undertaken in parallel with a similar study at the University of Osaka, and the two cities were twinned as promoters of urban robots. There was a demonstration in Passeig de Sant Joan: two mobile robots and an automatic car. People in the street approached and asked questions. You could ask the robots where the hospital was or ask them to accompany you to the automatic car, which would then drive you to your requested destination.

Barcelona has signed the Smart City Protocol and the City Council is working to consolidate good practices to make Barcelona a smart city. What is the view of the Robotics Institute on this, and how is it participating?

Well, in fact, URUS drew up a preliminary protocol to define everything that had to be standardised when defining actions and processes in different places. If people had to be evacuated in the middle of a fire, for example, and we had robots that helped the humans in this emergency, it would be good to have homologous behaviour everywhere, both for reasons of efficiency and so that their actions would be understandable to all of the users. If we standardise the protocols, we could also make the robots more universal, and therefore make the investment needed for developing them more cost effective.

Xavier Verdaguer is one of the most creative and international entrepreneurs that Barcelona has produced. He holds computing engineering and technical architecture degrees from Pompeu Fabra University, has studied top level management at Stanford University, and defines himself as a serial entrepreneur. Over the course of his career he has created several companies, and is currently behind three Silicon Valley projects: Innovalley, dedicated to the design of smart clothing; Seven4Seven, which develops apps; and Imagine, a creativity programme for young entrepreneurs. Verdaguer calls upon our universities and business schools to train their students in entrepreneurial skills to make up for the country’s shortcomings in this area.

© Italo Rondinella

You were an inventor from a very early age. There is an episode of the programme Joc de ciència [Science Game] in which, at the tender age of 12, you receive an award for creating a machine…

Yes, a pluviograph, a device for measuring rain intensity. It is probably still at the Sant Miquel dels Sants school, where I was in my sixth or seventh year of primary education. TV3 organised a competition for inventions, theoretically for older kids. A classmate and I lied about our age to be able to take part with a device that we built with things I had pinched from my granny, like an alarm clock and a biscuit tin. However, the contraption worked, and generated a rain graph. The prize was a Commodore 64: it was my first computer, which set me on the path towards IT. That is what being an entrepreneur is about, having a dream and fighting to make it real, not just going to a notary and signing a company’s articles of association…

You have set up a good number of companies over the course of your working life. You started with TMTFactory.

Yes, it was my first, and it has been with me since I started out up to the present day, through some hard times, such as when I went bust in 2001 with the dot-com bubble. The first commission was a project for the Barcelona Maritime Museum. At the time, I was a computer expert in a civil engineering consulting firm, and started to do things on my own with 3D and multimedia production. In 1997, I went in for a tender at the museum with a project to explain the port’s history interactively, although I cheated a bit as I had no company incorporated. The proposal consisted of explaining, using touch screens, how the port had evolved in different periods. They gave me three months to set up an exhibition. I had to create a team and shut myself into my flat in Gràcia until everything was ready. The exhibition won an award for the best multimedia production from Spain and Portugal. After that we continued to work with multimedia projects until the internet did away with CDs and we started doing websites. Until 2001…

You said you went bust…

I worked for a single client, and when the bubble burst the client disappeared overnight, owing us a lot of money. I come from a very humble family and have never had a financial cushion, so the crisis dragged us all down. I had to lay off all 20 workers and start again from scratch. The failure was very tough, because you get black listed.

What qualities are needed to be a real entrepreneur? What skills should be worked on in schools?

Firstly, students’ communication skills must be worked on, because otherwise they will be unable to present or sell projects, and it goes without saying that English should be taught better. Secondly, we need to promote leadership. Success is frowned upon and entrepreneurs lack ambition and the will to change the world. We need people with drive, and this has to be instilled in children from an early age. Here, an entrepreneur who does well is immediately pigeon-holed as a businessman, a term that has negative connotations.

And in more advanced stages?

The entrepreneurial spirit must be promoted at university. In the United States, lecturers encourage students to create companies. Having an entrepreneurial experience is like a whole school, because you have to know a bit of everything: accounting, public relations, planning, and so on. It is not just a matter of training managers, but rather entrepreneurs, in all schools, from teacher teaching to pharmacy. Barcelona has very good business schools, such IESE and ESADE, which should divert management training towards entrepreneurial skills; otherwise they will miss the boat. Here, university researchers work to obtain scientific prestige; in the United States they never lose sight of the entrepreneurial horizon. University research in Catalonia should keep the market in mind, to attract investment, with more pragmatic objectives. In the United States, universities encounter fewer administrative obstacles if, for example, they want to set up a spinoff to create a company. By way of illustration, the President of Stanford University sits on Google’s Board of Directors. In contrast, here it would be unthinkable for a university president to be a member of the board of directors of a major company. There is a very big barrier between the universities and business, and this makes knowledge and technology transfer difficult.

Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, says that “the twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one”…

My discourse on technology is more optimistic. Technology is unstoppable. The internet is spreading like wildfire and will make things reach everyone faster. A Maasai with an internet-enabled mobile has more information now than Ronald Reagan had 20 years ago, when he was President of the United States. At this moment in time, barely a quarter of humankind is connected to the internet, but this figure will increase to three-quarters by 2020. This low-cost internet penetration will democratise many things the first world already has, such as access to education and information.

© Italo Rondinella

A few years ago you launched the Imagine project, which seeks to motivate young entrepreneurs from here and take them to Silicon Valley for a spell. What are these projects about?

Right now we are working on a technology to purify water, a commission from Unilever, a multinational company with a very strong foundation behind it. They have realised that in a few years’ time there will not be enough water for everyone, and asked us to come up with a proposal for saving water. We created a team of three young people with very different profiles: a mathematician, a publicist and a creative. None of them had knowledge of environmental management. The mathematician developed an index to measure responsible water consumption, which takes demographic mass, industry and environmental needs into account. The publicist proposed the organisation of a world competition of cities – 180 of them, including Viladecans, where the company is sited – which will compete to improve their consumption index. To promote community motivation, an urban element is installed in the main square of each city so that the residents can follow the index’s progress. As of this moment people are asked to propose specific saving measures. Our creative’s idea, for example, consists of taking a shower while listening to a song that lasts no longer than five minutes. It has been demonstrated that if you limit your shower time to the length of a song you can reduce your regular water consumption from 160 litres to 80. So the idea is to publicise measures that motivate people in general.

This collective motivation is essential if we are to move towards smart cities, a new paradigm of interaction with the environment which will only be possible if there is hyperconnectivity among people. Connectivity does not mean social cohesion. Perhaps technology alone is not enough…

Evidently, technology cannot be an end in itself; it has to be a means. It offers us a series of new possibilities, which will take shape in what we now call the Internet of Things, but the use that people make of it and how we leverage the opportunities that emerge in order to cooperate and add information will be more decisive. One person has half an idea and another person might have the other half. Social networks promote connectivity, and therefore creativity, but technology alone is useless.

As a company, is Imagine solvent?

It is not a business, but rather an open project. It is my most successful business in the sense that the transformation of the people who participated in the three editions has generated an emotional yield. Imagine was a turning point in their lives. They went through a very intense experience that helped them to transform the environment.

You have also created a highly international community with the Supertramps project. How did this adventure start?

A few years ago I had a scare, health-wise, but I recovered. While I was getting over it, I took a semi-sabbatical year and a more relaxed attitude to work. I decided to travel the world for six months, got all my visas and vaccines, but I never paid a single night’s hotel. I did couchsurfing. Moving from one sofa to another, I reached India and Nepal. Over the course of this period I shared photos of people with open arms with the people I met. These photos, which I posted on Facebook, are called Supertramps. They have spread everywhere, and every day I receive about a dozen photos on the FB supertrampspage, which now has 3,500 “likes”. To my mind, happiness is not real until it is shared.

Your journey ended when you set up in California to study at Stanford University. You did a Master’s degree there, and founded Innovalley in 2010, a company that develops “smart” clothing.

Yes. Innovalley merges Catalan creativity and fashion with American technology. We make gear for motorcyclists with built-in GPS, using sensors which tell you whether to turn left or right, for example. We began making branded clothes accessories, but some time ago we began to work for the major fashion brands and other accessory manufacturers. We work on long-term research projects, which means we won’t see some of the products on the market for a while, but we have a great time testing the prototypes that we produce.

You once defined yourself as a “serial entrepreneur”. Are you more of an entrepreneur than a businessman?

Yes, I am more interested in generating new business ideas, designing the business, putting together a team that works and starting it up, then turning it over to a management team.

This distinction between entrepreneur and manager is very American, isn’t it?

Yes. There would be two models. One that starts up and manages that project for ever, which is typical of here, and the founder model, which is creative but is not involved in management.

What does Barcelona need to acquire or catch this enterprising spirit?

First of all, a direct flight to San Francisco. Right now, the Mobile World Congress makes us the world mobile phone capital. Barcelona is very well-positioned here. It is a sector where talent prevails, and there is a lot of it. We must create a cluster of entrepreneurs in Barcelona.

When all is said and done, we are in the midst of globalisation. What can you do in California that you can’t do here?

Right, that is true; the place is not everything. To begin with, we should wonder why Israel is the second country in the world with most companies listed on the NASDAQ. We are still lacking an entrepreneurship culture here. Catalonia is the third European research power in science. We have talent and people with money who do not invest enough in local talent. Barcelona is like a start-up. We have had interesting waves, but now we have opportunities. Nowadays, Barcelona is a creativity brand associated with many things: football, cuisine, architecture, design… And it seems that we do not realise this. Sectors must be reinvented. We can decide the direction we want to take.

Could the Silicon Valley ecosystem be replicated in Barcelona?

Any place in the world can be enterprising, but some eco-systems are better than others. It is more difficult to be an entrepreneur in Barcelona than in San Francisco, where there are investors, opportunities and machinery ready to turn ideas with teams into a business… In San Francisco the environment is very positive and you learn a lot more. There are a lot of highly qualified people who are also very accessible. Here, on the other hand, you have to go through endless filters to get to speak to certain people…

So what are we lacking?

The culture of failure. And the culture of success… Here, anyone who is successful falls under suspicion immediately. And the risk culture. We have to be passionate about what we do, we have to work with a more positive mindset. In the United States, if you lose your job you have no unemployment benefit, but people pull through. We also need the mentoring culture. We need to join forces and cooperate a lot more. We are too focused on Spain. Catalonia has to look towards the world, and make its own contribution. Our world is the world. Sometimes I kind of wish that Spain would boycott our products because this would oblige us to sell abroad, and we would buck up.

Do you, an entrepreneur, believe that an independent Catalonia could make it on its own?

I don’t know, but I like to share this collective dream. Having a dream and fighting for it is an entrepreneurial attitude. With this kind of attitude we can achieve great things and greater happiness, both in the world of business and in life in general, and the same applies to building the future of a nation. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is a good road to happiness.

If you came back to live in Barcelona, what business would you get into?

I would probably be into telephony, or social issues, or perhaps both of them together. Barcelona has a vast degree of social innovation potential that must be discovered and harnessed. The Hub Candidate Barcelona has been created, a platform that seeks to connect, promote and foster the social entrepreneurs’ big ideas. The Hub Barcelona Initiative belongs to a global network of 31 hubs spread out over the five continents whose mission is to change the world by applying sustainable business models that can be extended and replicated. A veritable ecosystem of social innovation.

Technology and happiness

In addition to his ongoing projects, over the course of his career Xavier Verdaguer has founded other companies, such as TMTFactory (multimedia contents and consulting for digital projects), BCNMedia (multimedia production), IntegraTV (interactive television), Smart Point (information point systems) and Bconsulting (software development). This creative man is an international partner of Barcelona Global and a promoter of the San Francisco – Barcelona Sisterhood initiative. He received the Barcelona Activa Entrepreneur award and the award for the best young creative entrepreneur in 2010, granted by the Junior Chamber International (JCI). He is also the driving force behind the Supertramps project (www.supertramps.ws) for sharing moments of happiness online.