Dark Matter Labs is focused on the great transitions our societies need to respond to the technological revolution and climate breakdown we face. Their aim is to discover, design and develop the institutional ‘dark matter’ that supports a more democratic, distributed and sustainable future. 

Indy Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs(DM) and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company). Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School. Indy was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association – 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University. He was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE for Services to Architecture in 2023. 

Adam Purvis has spent over two decades as a mission-driven systems tinkerer helping to build movements and networks that support fairer, more resilient futures. At Dark Matter Labs, Adam helps steward emerging areas of work and plays a role internally at DM, supporting the long view as the organisation explores how we might shift towards more regenerative systems. Before joining DM, Adam co-founded Power of Youth and then FutureX. These were originally just excuses to gather like-minded entrepreneurs he hoped to grow old and change the world with. Those endeavours snowballed into initiatives that ended driving significant shifts in influencing how governments (such as the CCP, EU Commision) and international multinationals (form EY to RBS) support mission driven entrepreneurship. Many of those mission-driven entrepreneurs are now collaborating with him again, this time on the work connected to DM’s Mission all over the world. Adam heads up the Human Machine Futures Arc at Dark Matter Labs and is currently co-leading the development of Outcome Accelerators, an attempt to build the enabling architecture needed to help this kind of work take root at the scale that it is now needed. 

Our institutions were built for efficiency in a stable world, but they are now being eroded by technological, environmental, and geopolitical unrest. Indy Johar and Adam Purvis of Dark Matter Labs will join Tima Bansal to explore what it takes to build organizations and institutions that can adapt to multiple futures — not by predicting what’s coming, but by contributing to what they call “civilizational optionality.” Their work spans food, housing, land, and nature systems, and they partner with organizations around the world, including the UNDP, the EU, and the Scottish Government. The conversation will move from the existential to the practical work of redesigning the rules, contracts, investment models, and governance systems that shape our world.

Register for Indy Johar and Adam Purvis’s session on April 8 from 10:00-11:00am EST.