Fabien Girardin

Fabien Girardin (Dipl.-Ing. Ph.D.) is a multidisciplinary technologist active at the interface between people and intelligent systems. He is a founding partner of Próximo Lab, a club of perpetual learners who experiment with emerging technologies.

With a Ph.D. in Computer Science and extensive experience in academia and industry, Fabien has been collaborating with organizations to discover "what might come next" just beyond the core of their activities. Clients seek his expertise in emerging technologies with a people-first mindset.

Refined over 15 years of experiments from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to the Near Future Laboratory, his approach is multidisciplinary. Together with a network of accomplices, he mixes creativity and imagination with logic, structure and engineering skills. Fabien is best known as a pioneer in futures design with the development of design fiction. He co-authored The Manual of Design Fiction, a guide to that practice, its origins, its utility and its impact.

Book launch of The Manual of Design Fiction at Instituto Tramontana in Madrid. 2023

Career

Throughout his career, Fabien experienced first-hand what it means to run a company that lasts, to co-create and launch products, to lead teams of talented technologists, to help executives make sense of emerging technologies, to publish seminal research work, to stretch people's imagination through public exhibits, to teach and mentor young professionals.

Most notably, he was a founding partner of Girardin & Nova, a multidisciplinary agency which addressed pressing planetary matters from the digitization of cities to the implications of environmental change. The partnership came to an end following Nicolas Nova's unexpected passing. Previously, he was a founding partner of the Near Future Laboratory, a distributed network of accomplished practitioners that became known as pioneers of Design Fiction^[1]. In parallel, he was co-CEO at BBVA Data & Analytics, a center of excellence in advanced analytics that derived knowledge and AI capabilities from financial data.^[2][3][4]

Plotting with the Near Future Laboratory colleagues: Julian Bleecker, Nick Foster and Nicolas Nova. Geneva, 2019.

Academic research and spin-offs

Fabien holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communications from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona^[5]. His research has been cited in over 2,400 academic publications in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed pioneering techniques for analyzing digital traces of human activity to drive urban innovation^[6][7]. He applied this research commercially for clients including the Louvre^[8], Navteq, and the City of Geneva. Together with colleague Nicolas Nova and Professor Pierre Dillenbourg, he co-founded Simpliquity, a university spin-off that developed an air-travel detection system for Boeing Corporation^[9].

In 2009, seeking to expand his practice beyond academic constraints, Fabien co-founded Lift Lab with Nicolas Nova and entrepreneur Laurent Haug. The company served as the consulting arm of the Lift Conference series, which focused on technology and society. Concurrently, he collaborated with data visualization studio Bestiario to bring to market a visual programming environment designed to democratize data manipulation and visualization—part of a practice he termed "Sketching with Data."^[10|

Early career

Prior to his graduate studies, he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies in Lausanne (EPFL) to manage and investigate the use of technologies for collaborative learning. Earlier in 1997, he developed a web directory popular in Switzerland that he later sold to a local Internet Service Provider to finance his studies in Computer Science at the Biel School of Engineering and expand his horizons working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley.

On stage with friend and business partner Nicolas Nova. Primer 2018 in Helsinki.

Teaching and public engagement

Besides occasional lectures in universities, design schools and business schools (e.g. ESADE, IAAC, IED, HEAD, Politecnico Milano, Instituto Tramontana), Fabien teaches at University School of Design, Innovation and Technology (UDIT) in Madrid. He speaks in international conferences such as O'Reilly Strata, TEDx, Sonar+D, Primer, Picnic, Lift, Barcelona Design Week, and Smart City World Congress. And his work has been exhibited at the Museum of the Future in Dubai^[11], the Design Museum in Barcelona^[12], the National Football Museum in Manchester, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Fundacion Telefonica in Madrid, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima and the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague.^[13]

Personal life

Born in Delémont, Switzerland, he has lived in Geneva, Oakland, Palo Alto, Barcelona, Boston, and Madrid. He has recently moved to Gijón, Spain, with his wife Eva and two children, Noah and Luna. He speaks fluent French, English, Spanish, and a rusty German.

References

Selected publications (full list)

[1] Bleecker, J., Foster, N., Girardin, F., Nova, N. (2022). The Manual of Design Fiction. Near Future Laboratory Publishing.

[2] Alfaro, E., Bressan, M., Girardin, F., Murillo, J., Someh, I., Wixom, B. (2019). BBVA's Data Monetization Journey. MIS Quarterly Executive 18 (2).

[3] Alfaro, E., Murillo, J., Girardin, F., Wixom, B., Someh, I. (2018). BBVA Fuels Digital Transformation Progress with a Data Science Center of Excellence. MIT CISR Publications.

[4] Girardin, F., Fleurquin, P. (2018). Designing for Trust with Machine Learning. AAAI 2018 Spring Symposia.

[4] Girardin, F., Lathia, N. (2017). When User Experience Designers Partner with Data Scientists. AAAI 2017 Spring Symposia.

[5] Girardin, F. (2009). Aspects of implicit and explicit human interactions with ubiquitous geographic information. Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

[6] Girardin, F., Calabrese, F., Dal Fiore, F., Ratti, C., and Blat, J. (2008). Digital footprinting: Uncovering tourists with user-generated content. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 7(4):36-43.

[7] Girardin, F., Vaccari, A., Gerber, A., Biderman, A., and Ratti, C. (2009). Quantifying urban attractiveness from the distribution and density of digital footprints. International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructure Research, 4:175-200.

[8] Yoshimura, Y., Sobolevsky, S., Ratti, C., Girardin, F., Carrascal, J. P., Blat, J., and Sinatra, R. (2014). An Analysis of Visitors’ Behavior in the Louvre Museum: A Study Using Bluetooth Data. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 41(6), 1113-1131.

[9] Girardin, F., Nova, N., and Dillenbourg, P. (2009). Detecting air travel to survey passengers on a worldwide scale. Journal of Location-Based Services, 3(3):210-226.

[10] Girardin, F. (2015). Sketching with Data, in New Challenges for Data Design. p6 189-205 Bihanic, David (Ed.), Springer

Exhibited work

[11] Orbital Space Station HOPE at the Museum of the Future in Dubai (2022)

[12] World's Eyes at Design Museum of Barcelona and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (2009)

[13] Winning Formula at the National Football Museum in Manchester, the CCCB in Barceloona, the Fundacion Telefonica in Madrid, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima and the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague (2014)