In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, the most valuable skill is learning to live and work confidently with ambiguity. Ambiguity isn't confusion; it's the state where multiple perspectives are equally valid and where work is performed with fuzzy boundaries.
While your typical work environment serves its purpose in moments of clarity, it may lack the ingredients needed to explore, experiment, and adapt as new technologies emerges. These essential components include access to tools, knowledge and insights. More fundamentally, this type of learning insists on a commitment: of time, curiosity, vulnerability and questions.
Here, at Próximo Lab, we think that thriving with ambiguity also requires friction. To consistently step out into the future takes courage, curiosity and collaborators.
What is Próximo Lab
Próximo Lab is a community of currently 30 members that functions like a gym for your curious mind. It provides the people and activities to develop and practice the skills at the core of thinking, experimenting and learning in our modern and sometimes frenetic world. Our members engage with each other through studios, tertulias, guest talks and other types of online creative activities.
Who is Próximo Lab for?
Próximo Lab is designed for perpetual learners—people driven by constant curiosity about others and the world around them. We value curiosity over credentials, welcoming participants from diverse domains including technology, design, art, culture, entrepreneurship and politics. This diversity enriches our community and creates unexpected connections between different ways of thinking. We favor individuals with low ego who are avid listeners and generous contributors, whether they approach challenges as creatives or pragmatists. What unites our members is an open mind and a shared belief in making things to think—the understanding that the act of creating and prototyping is itself a powerful form of learning and discovery.
Key benefits:
- Build essential modern skills: Develop confidence working with ambiguity and cultivate an intuitive sense for what the evolving technological landscape means for you.
- Active learning: Move beyond theory to develop, test, and articulate your perspective through prototyping, writing, listening on domains you care about.
- Fresh perspectives: Keep your thinking agile with unexpected insights and approaches.
- Valuable network: Learn from and form connections with experienced professionals who share your curiosity.
Our Studios
Think of our studios like yoga studios, spin studios, or pilates studios within a fitness center. This is more a gym for athletes in all phases of their careers, than for people who re-join every January 5th. The studios are dedicated virtual spaces designed to shape specific types of explorations. In each, a cohort of 4-8 members works together under an expert’s guidance over weeks, not hours. Participants are carefully matched to ensure meaningful, and sometimes spicy, collaborations.
Prototyping Studios
Hands-on experimentation and building
Join a multi-week guided exploration at the crossroad of technology and people.. Like a fitness class that meets weekly, your cohort gathers around experiments to learn new concepts and tools while sharing progress, challenges, and breakthroughs with fellow explorers.
Throughout the studio, some members participate in experiments, present emerging tools, develop ideas into working prototypes. Others serve as critical voices—offering unexpected perspectives, strong feedback, and guidance that challenges assumptions. Each participant return to their work or projects with prototypes they can use to showcase ideas and learnings. For example:
Prototyping studio: AI assistants and digital identity
Instructors: Fabien Girardin and Rohit Gupta.
Participants: 5 members
Explore the emerging landscape of AI assistants that can mimic human behavior, speech patterns, and decision-making.
- Week 1: Voice and Personality
- Week 2: Knowledge and memory
- Week 3: Behavioral cloning
- Week 4: Working prototype
- Week 5: Discuss learnings
Writing Studios
Refine your ideas and augment your voice
Like a writer's workshop that meets regularly over many weeks, these studios mix critical reading, research, listening and writing in a structured format to develop, then challenge your perspective.. Over the course of your studio session, share everything from essays to a proposed talk, to a bumpy outline, whatever best expresses your emerging ideas.
Each week, some participants focus on presenting their material, while others contribute through thoughtful critique and collaborative refinement. Examples of Writing studios:
Writing studio in English
Facilitator: Patrick Pittman
Participants: 8 members
Writing studio in French
Facilitator: Fabien Girardin
Participants: 6 members
Writing studio on Trust
Facilitator: Lisa Gansky
Participants: 8 members
Curious to join?
Our founding cohort of 30 members has already joined. These are people from our network or those who were enthusiastically referred to us. We plan to welcome new members in waves, with timing determined by our ability to properly onboard and connect each person who joins.
If you're interested in being part of Próximo Lab, please contact us.
Membership structure
Our fee structure designed to ensure quality learning and meaningful collaborations:
Annual Membership Fee: Your yearly membership gives access to our activities, our tools, and the infrastructure that makes the community possible, plus it includes the participation to a studio at no additional cost
Studio Fee: Each additional studio you join requires a separate fee that covers expert facilitation, curated experiments, materials, and the small cohort experience. This ensures each studio maintains the quality and intimacy that makes the learning experience transformative.
This structure allows you to engage at your own pace—some members participate in one studio per year to explore a specific domain deeply, while others join multiple studios to broaden their perspective across different areas. The flexibility ensures you can match your investment to your learning goals and availability.
About us: We believe in making things to think
Próximo Lab was founded by Lisa Gansky and Fabien Girardin. We are design-forward technologists active since the early days of the web. Some might call us "misfits" because we are driven by our curiosity and the intent to shape our future rather than conform to styles imposed by others.
Our driving force is to challenge the status quo including biases, assumptions and static culture in organizations. Throughout our careers, we experienced first-hand what it means to lead teams of creative people and to integrate emerging technologies into products, solutions, business models and movements. With our network, we have developed a know-how that relies on prototyping techniques to provoke thinking, fuel imagination, shape strategies and lead transformations in the near future.
Lisa Gansky, Founding Partner
Lisa builds and advises projects that ask better questions—about trust, access, ownership, and the systems that shape our lives. Her bestselling book The Mesh, along with its TED Talk, anticipated the rise of platform models and helped bring ideas like access over ownership into the mainstream.
Fabien Girardin, Founding Partner
Fabien is a multidisciplinary technologist active at the interface between people and software. He is best known as a pioneer in the domain of futures design and the development of the practice of Design Fiction.
Rohit Gupta, Limited Partner
Rohit is a designer and an engineer who builds things for creative enquiry.