Fabien Girardin

Fabien Girardin

Dipl.-Ing. Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communication

Fabien Girardin is a researcher and engineer in Computer Science who explores how emerging technologies reshape the way people live, work, and create. He collaborates with, challenges, and inspires the people building what comes next across industries.

Refined through two decades of experiments across academia, startups, and global companies, his approach is multidisciplinary. Together with a network of accomplices, he mixes design and imagination with logic, structure and engineering skills to explore bold “what if” questions.

He is the co-author of The Manual of Design Fiction, co-founder of the Pre-Alpha Club, board member of CH++, Adjunct Professor at UDIT, and creator of Rumbo. Across these roles, he advocates for a people-first approach to technology.

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 most renowned clients included BBVA, Boeing, Dubai Future Foundation, Google X, Le Louvre, Swiss Department of Defense, Telefónica. 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 Fiction1. 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.234

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

Academic research and spin-offs

Fabien holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Digital Communications from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona5. 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 innovation67. He applied this research commercially for clients including the Louvre8, 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 Corporation9.

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

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

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 Nicolas Nova, Primer 2018 in Helsinki
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. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of the Future in Dubai11, the Design Museum in Barcelona12, the National Football Museum in Manchester, the CCCB in Barcelona, the Fundacion Telefónica 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.
  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, p.189-205. Bihanic, David (Ed.), Springer.
  11. Girardin, F. (2026). Writing with Probabilistic Machines. Mosaic, no. 206. ISSN: 1696-3296.
  12. Girardin, F., Lathia, N. (2017). When User Experience Designers Partner with Data Scientists. AAAI 2017 Spring Symposia.
  13. Nova, N. and Girardin, F. (2008). Sliding Fiction: The Harmonious Jungle of Contemporary Cities, Walabab editions.

Exhibited work

Selected media coverage

Recent posts (RSS)

Contact

Catch-up
calendly/fgirardin
Email
fgirardin@gmail.com
Connect
linkedin/fabiengirardin
Read
medium/@girardin 7.5th Floor