Adrenaline. Magic.
“These feelings occurred when you make your idea becoming real”.
This passion of making, discovered during her childhood, led Pia Ferreya to choose industrial design as a career to design real products to answer real needs. However, after her studies in Buenos Aires, she couldn’t find any space to build her ideas and the only jobs offered consisted of designing products without making them. Moreover, with a bunch of friends, she was looking for courses to improve her skills in designing and making and she quickly realized that it didn’t exist such offer for workers. Her visit to a makerspace during her holidays was a revelation. She made researches and discovered that such place gathers everything her friends and she was looking for and even more: learning, making and collaborating.
At the end of 2014, with 2 friends, they launched a website to pitch their ideas* and to offer courses of design and making. Their success confirmed the need of opening a makerspace so after 2 years she left her job and opened with a partner the first physical space of Laborando. “Make, learn(by making) and share” are the values of Laborando but more than a space, Laborando aims to be designed as a tool to enable anyone to go further, faster and better in her/his project.
Nowadays, the space is still valued as a tool but it has been adapted to fit with the Argentinian culture. Its great success lies in its strong community of permanent entrepreneurs and the great filling ratio of its weekly courses.
If the objective is to open an entire building to gather dozens of entrepreneurs and artisans and to offer to anyone tools and support to start making products, in short-term Pia is looking for consolidating her community of members offering them new services and for increasing the number of courses in partnership with other spaces.
