We’re a multidisciplinary team with a shared passion for taking on societal challenges in education, food systems, urban design, logistics, data, policy, finance, healthcare, governance and organisational culture.

Meet the team ︎ 

Adam Purvis
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Edinburgh

Adam is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and has spent over a decade building mission led movements and networks. His primary role at Dm is holding the team and driving internal clarity.

Alberto Hernández Morales
🇳🇱 Delft

Alberto’s work has focused on adapting and applying statistical methods, optimization, econometric and demographic techniques on regional development and policy evaluation for agricultural and natural resources. Alberto trained at Cornell University as a regional scientist and has worked characterizing social and economic systems in Mexico, the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Aleksander Nowak
🇩🇰 Copenhagen

Aleksander Nowak is a strategic designer, researcher, data analyst and an architect, with expertise in data visualisation, spatial and system mappings. His main area of research within Dark Matter Labs and Urbanism and Societal Change Program (KADK, Cph) has been focusing on food systems, biodiversity & finance, and visual methods as participatory tools aiding societal and sustainable change.

Alex Bekker
🇺🇸 New York

Alex is a strategic designer and policy researcher and holds graduate degrees in international law, public policy and strategic design. Her work focuses on understanding, critiquing and reimagining the ways social, legal and economic systems exercise power. At Dark Matter Labs, she works on care infrastructures, deliberative democracy and new commons. Previously, Alex worked at the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and nonprofits in social innovation and human rights.

Alicia Carvajal Rowan
🇪🇸 Madrid

Alicia is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, after completing her postgraduate studies in Strategies and Technologies for Development (UPM & UCM), she has worked as a Sustainability Consultant in Madrid where she will be supporting Dark Matter’s work in the region.

Alizé De Buck
🇬🇧 East Sussex

Alizé holds Dark Matter Labs financial and operational processes and structures. Having studied Politics & Sociology followed by an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, she has a love for questioning our underlying social assumptions and how these impact the way we interpret and understand our social and natural environments, something she is looking forward to apply in the financial and operational planning at Dark Matter Labs. She also recently started studying Cognitive Neuroscience part-time to explore the human mind and its interconnection with the different environments that shape it. Before joining Dark Matter Labs, Alizé was overseeing the operations and finances of a leading international Interior Design practice.

Andrea Fernandes
🇪🇸 Murcia

Andrea graduated from the University of Southampton with a first class honours degree in French and Spanish. Andrea spent a year teaching English and studying cultural diversity in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Northern Africa. A Chartered Accountant and Fellow of the ICAEW, before joining Dm as Group Accountant she trained with Deloitte in audit and then worked for a variety of organisations including listed groups such as De La Rue Plc and Estée Lauder Companies. She most enjoyed working for a developer of affordable and sustainable homes for people in housing need. A financial reporting specialist, Andrea’s work focuses on using financial information to contribute to the growth and development of businesses. 

Anna Rosero
🇭🇺 Budapest

Anna has recently graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA in modern languages and cultures and Business & Management. After working on projects as a researcher, she now primarily focuses on our people processes.

Annette Dhami
🇬🇧 Cornwall

Annette has worked in mission-led organisational and network design for over a decade. This includes the crafting and implementation of organisational practices, processes and infrastructure across finance, teams, strategy, culture, programme design, workspace and more. Her focus is on how we build distributed, democratic, collaborative and beautiful ways of working together fit for the transitions ahead of us.

Arianna Smaron
🇨🇭Basel 🇵🇱 Rzeszów

Arianna is a Product and Visual designer working through digital and physical materials and perspectives. She has experience working with Private and Public Institutions, Art Museums, and Universities. At the same time, she is the Director of the educative program of an experimental school called La Scuola Open Source and part of various collective groups of artists and designers between Italy and Switzerland. Her design is defined through the combination of collaborative and non-linear methodologies and the definition of alternative visual narratives.

Axel Nilsson
🇸🇪 Malmö

Axel is a machine learning engineer and data explorer at Dark Matter Labs. He is focusing on helping to turn ideas into prototypes and leveraging the potentials of AI in suitable contexts. He has studied at EPFL, Switzerland, where he gained experience in fields such as robotics, hardware and software prototyping, design thinking, and machine learning. After some entrepreneurial experiences, he specialised in graph neural networks before joining Dark Matter Laboratories.

Bulent Ozel
🇳🇱 Amsterdam

Bulent is a complex system scientist bridging science, technology, and policy making. He is co-founder of Lucidminds.ai a human centric, hands on data science and AI initiation. He is an advocate of open and collective innovation paradigms. He has published numerous peer reviewed citation indexed articles. As part of his first PhD he was a Fulbright Scholar at School of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University. His works are focused on agent-based modelling and simulation, social network analysis, machine learning, adoption of blockchain technologies, and distributed collaboration.

Calvin Po
🇬🇧 London

Calvin is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs. He has worked on alternative development models of public land combining affordable land tenure, planning innovation and distributed DfMA supply chains to encourage development by and for residents, and also deep retrofit at a community scale. Calvin trained as an architect in UCL Bartlett and the Architectural Association, and has worked on mixed-use urban regeneration projects in London and beyond. His personal research is focused on the English planning system’s history, and speculating on new decentralised models for the regulation of the built environment.

Carlotta Conte
🇬🇧 London

Carlotta is an urban researcher and system designer and leads the Design Learning & Insight at Dark Matter Labs. She trained at the Architectural Association and co-founded the multi- disciplinary collective Tak Tak Tak. She focuses on interpreting and narrating the impact of technological and behavioural changes on our ecosystems to push the boundaries of design thinking, experience and knowhow.

Cat Magill
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Edinburgh

Cat’s work focuses on figuring out how to bring things to life. She works in tangible, people-centred contexts, exploring how different perspectives, values and priorities come together in the process of developing and testing new ideas. Her perspective and way of working has been shaped by years of living and working across cultures, contexts and geographies. Before joining Dm she co-led a multi-stakeholder data-and-design ‘living lab’ focused on urban innovation and civic participation.

Chloe Treger
🇬🇧 London

Chloe is research and analysis lead for Dark Matter. With degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MSc in Urban Planning and City Design from the UCL Bartlett School of Planning, at Dark Matter Labs she has built up a wide-ranging experience in strategic projects, including innovative approaches to unlocking collective investment in urban civic assets; building narratives to explore regulatory futures and developing experimental pathways towards a technologically enabled next generation system of environmental governance.

Dan Hill
🇬🇧 London

Dan works with residents, businesses, institutions, partners and collaborators on deliverable projects that make fairer, more resilient and friendlier communities and neighbourhoods. He is particularly passionate about genuinely affordable homes, keeping culture and mixed workspace in the city, thriving local centres, bringing nature into everyday life, and demonstrating change in the food system. He's a life-long Londoner.

Doeun Kim
🇰🇷 Seoul

Doeun is in charge of accounting and finance at Dark Matter Labs in South Korea. Before joining Dm as a group accountant, she worked in deal advisory and audit at KPMG. She has a particular strength in financial analysis and business feasibility review in the deal advisory sector, and focuses on presenting directions for corporate growth and development based on these strengths.

Emily Harris
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland

Emily is a Chartered Accountant and a Fellow of the ICAEW. She also holds an MA in Regenerative Economics (Distinction) from Schumacher College and a BSc in Medical Sciences from Imperial College. She originally trained with Deloitte in London and was a manager in their Big Ticket Restructuring Team during the 2008 global financial crisis. For the last 11 years she has been running her own consultancy business which has taken her all over the world and included a number of international CFO positions. Emily is deeply interested in exploring the subjectivity of economic value creation and how the hierarchical interplay of 'use' Vs 'exchange' value manifests at the systemic level. She is committed to challenging the imagined order or our financial and economic systems, with a focus on the role that the accountancy profession might play in catalysing a transition to a more regenerative economy.

Eugénie Cartron
🇫🇷 Montpellier

Eugénie is a transition-oriented and mission-driven transdisciplinary designer. Trained in development economics, innovation management, public administration, systems thinking with a background in social innovation design and place-based design, her multifaceted journey converges to contribute to systems change with structural innovation. Combining complexity sense making with strategic visioning, in the past her practice and research have explored systems of poverty and deprivation, sustainable and inclusive urban futures or the development of a design-led framework for missions accelerating systems transitions.

Eunji Kang
🇰🇷 Seoul  🇬🇧 London

Eunji is systems change and experimental products lead at Dark Matter Labs. She is currently based in Seoul Innovation Park, South Korea, on behalf of Dm and leads projects throughout Europe and Asia regions. Her practice uses visual communication and system thinking to identify complex societal challenges which capture collective intelligence in order to develop strategic pathways for the systems change.

Eunsoo Lee
🇰🇷 Seoul

Trained in cultural studies and urban theory, Eunsoo works at the intersection of humanities and technology, pondering ways to insert critical thought into technological practice and technology into humanities research. At Dark Matter Labs, she combines system thinking and critical analysis to curate narratives on societal challenges and possible interventions. Eunsoo has been involved in diverse research and teaching practices in the past, including an MPhil project on urban space and politics in Hong Kong and projects on digital intimacy, the future of work, and alternative education in the Asian region.

Fang-Jui Chang
🇬🇧 London

Fang is a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Service Design. She has worked in a design capacity at both the Taiwanese and British governments plus architecture and design consultancies. Along side these roles Fang has also run courses at democracy and public service innovation related events in Asia, Europe, and North America. The main body of her work focused on digital democracy, public service innovation, citizen engagement, collaborative policy and rule making.

Gavin Lewis
🇸🇪 Stockholm

Gavin is a research and urban planner, committed to helping cities build their capacity to experiment, learn, and accelerate their just climate transitions. Gavin holds a B.Sc. in Environmental Science & Ecology from Villanova University and a M.Sc. in Sustainable Urban Planning from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He has experience working with a range of urban sustainability challenges across operations, engagement, education, research, and strategic design. To date, Gavin has was worked with Boston's bike share system, Green City Growers, WWF Cities, Publica Associates, EIT Urban Mobility, and Vinnova.

Gurden Batra
🇫🇮 Helsinki

Gurden is a design technologist at Dark Matter Labs and combines different crafts like systems thinking, rapid prototyping, speculative and critical design, data justice and tech materiality together in his practice. He has a background in Computer Science and New Media Design. Gurden has played multi-disciplinary roles in various industries and different sized companies across US, Europe and India.

Györgyi Gálik
🇬🇧 London

With a background in social design, behavioural science and environmental health, Gyorgyi has seventeen years of experience designing and delivering experimental research, innovation and technology design projects in the corporate, governmental and non-governmental sectors. She is the City Transitions Mission Co-Lead at Dark Matter Labs. Previously she worked as the Head of Strategic Partnerships at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and as a Lead Advisor of the Built Environment Team and as the interim Head of Social Innovation at Design Council. Gyorgyi also did a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art in London (focusing on design, systems and climate change).

Hannah Stewart
🇬🇧 Cumbria

Hannah does impact driven research, project management and making to explore what sustainable futures are possible or probable; using artefacts, public engagement, speculative design and action research. Hannah is passionate about design justice, regenerative economies and enabling systemic change – focused on design interventions that consider the ‘dark matter’ of people and culture as much as data and our made world.

Indy Johar
🇬🇧 London

Indy is a founding Director of 00 and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, Indy is a Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation and a visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield. He co-founded Impact Hub Birmingham and Open Systems Lab, was a member of the RSA’s Inclusive Growth Commission. He is a thought leader in system change, the future of urban infrastructure finance, outcome-based investment, and the future of governance.

Ivana Stancic
🇩🇰 Copenhagen  🇪🇸 Barcelona

Ivana is a Copenhagen based strategic design partner focused on systems change in urban planning and territorial transition. Her expertise is bridging strategic design and urban planning. To this role she brings more than 10 years research and design lead experience focused on sustainable urban development and future city strategies.

Jack Minchella
🇬🇧 London

Jack is strategic design lead, combining design-thinking, process management & systems strategy. An architect by training, Jack joined the Dark Matter team two years ago and leads on a wide range of strategic research and futures visualisation projects. He has been leading the creation of client-focussed outputs for workshops and senior external partners communication. Jack has extensive experience in social innovation, sustainable urban futures & policy design. As well as co-founding the think-tank In-Between Economies in Copenhagen.

Jason Brown
🇨🇦 Vancouver

Based in Vancouver - Canada, Jason supports and coordinates the internal operations of Dark Matter Labs. A recent International Relations graduate, he is a young and ambitious self-starter who enjoys working in complex environments that require creative innovations, project leadership, and a human centered approach. Jason will be working on our institutional framework, the dark matter of dark matter, that facilitates how we show up as a planetary decentralized organization.

Jayne Engle
🇨🇦 Montréal

Jayne is an urbanist, strategist & adj professor, and co-authored the book Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities. Now a mission co-holder at Dark Matter Labs, she previously led a civic innovation portfolio in philanthropy and worked in diverse societal change contexts--from regional policy & economic transition in post-Soviet Eastern Europe; to post-disaster community research in Haiti; to urban transformation in many US, Canadian, and Western European cities. Jayne’s passionate about futures of cities, philanthropy & institutions and committed to decolonizing systems & opening possibilities for what that means. She holds a PhD in Urban Planning, Policy and Design from McGill University and is a Positive Deviant fellow with Wolf Willow Institute.

Jonathan Lapalme
🇨🇦 Montréal

Jonathan holds a Masters of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons The New School for Design in New York. He has been working for more than ten years on various types of urban related challenges and innovations, acting either as a strategic designer, entrepreneur, curator, documentary filmmaker, writer or speaker. Jonathan co-instigated a number of organisations and initiatives to address issues such as chronic vacancy, heritage destruction, biodiversity loss, and lack of regulatory infrastructures, to name a few. Lapalme's work has appeared in a number of magazines, newspapers and museums.

Joost Beunderman
🇬🇧 London  🇳🇱 Amsterdam

Joost is an urbanist, writer and researcher. A director at Project00, he has led on a wide range of projects across the 00 network - from urban regeneration to employment space, from civic venturing to outcomes-focused finance for green infrastructure. He was educated at Utrecht University, University of California-Berkeley and the London School of Economics, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Juhee Hahm
🇰🇷 Seoul

Juhee  is a strategic designer with a mixed background in spatial, communication and experience design. Her projects have taken her from South Korea to the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Kenya. Juhee approaches urban space as a medium built from complex layers that communicate to create multiple levels of experience. With this perspective she explores the themes of supply chain infrastructure, experimentation in civic policy, comprehensive human development frameworks and systemic urban transition.

Konstantina Koulouri
🇬🇧  London

Konstantina is leading research on Natural Capital Innovation: the financialization of Nature, ecosystem services, valuation and Natural Capital Markets. Her work focuses on examining environmental challenges and technological advancements to interpret potential applications for scalable solutions.

Leon Seefeld
🇸🇪 Gothenburg

Leon is currently based in Gothenburg. He has been working in social innovation and sustainability consulting for several years, among other things, leading his own consultancy firm for regenerative business model innovation and advising on the B Corp certification. He also worked on large-scale landscape restoration projects through weaving multi-stakeholder processes and social labs. Leon holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Business Management and a Master’s in Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability. He is now driven by the ambition to leverage finance as a vehicle for systemic transformation.

Linnéa Rönquist
🇸🇪 Malmö

Linnéa is an architect and strategic designer, committed to drive the intangible infrastructuring in society. With experience from across the planet, she uses systems thinking to understand the root causes of emerging symptoms, such as mental ill-health or nutrition decline, to inform the re-coding of their dark matter.

Lorenza Agosti
🇮🇹 Milan

Lorenza is a strategic designer with experience in the field of transport and mobility with a focus on users interface with the environment and the information delivered, crossing boundaries between architecture, wayfinding and services design. She holds a master's degrees in Sustainable Architecture from the University of Venice, with a dissertation on the role played by the built environment on human health.

Meggan Collins
🇸🇪 Malmö

Trained as an Architect (ARB) and Urbanist at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Meggan works as a strategic designer at Dark Matter Labs with a strong focus on systemic shifts within urban environments to help build a more sustainable future. As an architect she designs in the threshold between research-based thinking and physical design as a means of dealing with today's societal challenges. Her personal research is focused on urban logistics from the perspective of infrastructure, emerging technologies, and landscapes.

Nasim Forootan
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Edinburgh

Nasim has worked in areas of people, culture and learning for over a decade, she holds an MA in Business and an MSc in International Management from Henley Business School. She is passionate about the intersectionality between people, leadership and the economy and believes in the power of personal and institutional transformation required to change the world. Nasim is also a Landecker Democracy and Humanity in Action Senior Fellow and engages in dialogues about new types of governance, enhancing diversity and embedding a new culture to shape the world for the better.

Oguzhan Yayla
🇩🇪 Berlin

Digital systems architect and engineer with experience in building scalable data infrastructures for startups and organisations in different continents. Oguzhan is co-founder of Lucidminds.ai, a complex system design & analysis company for social, economic, and environmental impact. His recent works focus on planet-focused infrastructure design, data privacy, and adoption of blockchain technologies.

Olaf Lewitz
🇩🇪 Berlin

As Trust Artist, Lover and Coach, Olaf helps us explore the dark matter of Dark Matter Labs: synthesising the structures and processing we need to do our work with as much freedom and creativity as possible, improving learning in the organisation and improving the flow of decisions, relationships and value creation.

Oliver Burgess
🇬🇧 London

Oliver is a strategic designer - combining user experience design and systems thinking to work on systems level problems for sustainable urban futures. He has degrees in Engineering from the University of Cambridge and Product Design from the Royal College of Art. He has experience in physical product design and manufacturing engineering - specifically in the areas of a circular economy and zero carbon energy transition - as well as in clean-tech innovation and consulting.

Raj Kalia
🇬🇧 London

Raj is co-lead of Capital and Investments at Dark Matter Labs, and works across different sectors and cities to develop the financial instruments and mechanisms that are needed to build the novel infrastructures required for our cities in the 21st century. His work includes the valuation of analysis of natural capital. With 25+ years of international experience in senior capital markets and asset management roles at global banks, Raj managed over $8.0bn in structured finance securitisations and derivatives. He developed new markets and structured financing and indexed instruments for hedge fund strategies. At Deutsche Bank in New York and London, he helped build the bank's hedge fund financing / origination as European head of Structured Funds & Derivatives Group, in Frankfurt as head of FI Risk Advisory Group. At WestLB, he led the bank's balance sheet hedge fund investment group and CLO securitisations.

Romy Snijders
🇳🇱 Amsterdam

Romy is a multidisciplinary designer using system thinking, design research and speculative design to work towards social and environmental sustainability. She holds a BSc Industrial Design from the Delft University of Technology and a MA/MSc Global Innovation Design from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. A very holistic approach is applied in her work, because she strongly believes that everything is interconnected. Romy is passionate about challenging people’s understanding of the world to shape a positive future.

Scarlett Martinez
🇨🇦 Montréal

Scarlett is a co-holder of Governance and Dm Canada and has experience building, holding, and mobilizing teams with a deep level of care, dedication, and integrity. She holds a trilingual Bachelor's in Business Administration with a Mayor in Marketing from HEC Montreal. Before joining Dark Matter Labs, Scarlett was overseeing the Marketing & Communications department for an international innovative arts organization dedicated to the evolution of cultural experiences. Her work has involved creating the structures, processes and models that enable empowerment, collaboration and accountability in the context of organizational change. From creating digital infrastructures involving multiple stakeholders and entities, to implementing dynamic data systems, identity rebranding orchestration, account and P&L management, partnerships agreements between many actors, distribution of immersive experiences in new markets, Scarlett carried each mission with an abiding respect for the shared learnings & decision-making processes that shape and foster meaningful relationships.

Seung Hee Han
🇰🇷 Seoul

Seunghee is a writer, researcher and strategic designer at South Korea team of Dark Matter Labs. After studied theory of arts, history of Korean design and french, she has worked on social innovation as a journalist and project manager. Her main concern is how to translate/recontextualise Dark Matter Labs' philosophy and strategies into Korean language and culture.

Sofia Valentini
🇳🇱 Amsterdam

Sofia Valentini is based in Amsterdam and has a background in Architecture and Masters from TU Delft and Wageningen in Metropolitan Analysis, Design and Engineering. Her field of work is on urban data analysis, sustainability, spatial strategies and data visualization. She has professional experience in working with GIS databases to analyze spatial data, as well as landscape architecture design. Sofia is driven by the ambition to analyze and solve complex urbanism related problems through the lenses of spatial planning.

Steven Bland
🇿🇦 Johannesburg

Steven is a strategic process facilitator, advisor and researcher working at the intersections of climate, cities, innovation, nature, and air quality. At Dm, he works in the Cities Transitions team designing and implementing strategic processes to support local governments and their partners to scale and speed up their efforts towards a climate-safe future.Steven has worked closely with municipalities and businesses in South Africa, Tanzania, the UK, Uganda, and Sweden.

Theo Campbell
🇫🇷 Paris

Theo is a social worker at heart but has always had an interest in technology and how it can be used for social change. He studied a Bachelor of social work at Flinders University in Adelaide Australia and has had a broad range of experience from co-founding a non profit, owning and running a bar and live music venue to working in local government. More recently he has been working in homelessness and harm reduction services in London and Paris as a social worker and data analyst. After learning Python for data analysis he discovered his interest for coding and began building websites for friends and personal projects.

Thomas Theodore
🇬🇧 London

Thomas is a writer and musician from East London. He uses his experience in journalism and creative direction to provide support around research, storytelling and legibility. He has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and is slowly learning 3D animation.

Tom Beresford
🇬🇧 London

Tom is a public sector researcher and innovation specialist. He has led a range of research, innovation and system change projects, working with providers of public services, charitable organisations, local authorities and international government agencies, across diverse contexts from Doncaster to Sub-Saharan Africa, London to Australia. Tom's work has tended towards place-based approaches, investing in the mobilisation of broad and deep coalitions across services, communities and industries.

Vlad Afanasiev
🇩🇪 Berlin

Vlad is a strategic designer and researcher, with a focus on urban and environmental governance, the use of forecasting technics, predictive simulation and modelling. Prior to joining Dark Matter he was part of The Terraforming research program and worked on region and nation-scale strategic projects across Ukraine related to territorial development and decentralized governance. He currently serves as a City & Technology program tutor at IAAC in Barcelona.

Zehra Zaidi
🇬🇧 London

Zehra brings policy, governance and legal/regulatory specialisms. She has 15 years of experience in legal reform, and programmes and policy design in international development working with international and multilateral organisations, as well as sovereign governments. Zehra has also worked as a Senior Adviser to the Rt Hon Andrew Mitchell MP when he was the UK Shadow Secretary of State for International Development and has experience of working across several Whitehall departments. She started her career as a competition and regulatory lawyer for a global law firm. In her spare time, she supports humanitarian work in conflict zones, and projects on social justice and diversity.