This week we meet with Indy Johar from Dark Matter Labs to discuss why and how our systems of governance should be reformed and why we need all professionals, including lawyers, joining this “Boring revolution”.  We, of course, look things from the legal (design) perspective so we concentrate on what role (legal) design has in making our societies fit for the needs of the 21st Century.

Global crises will become more frequent in the future, due to climate change escalating other phenomena, we need to create new, agile ways to manage unpredictable force majeure type of events. There might be situations where governments have only a few hours to react in order to protect their citizens, or just 24 hours to pass a new law. The new reality will demand us to change also the way we design regulation – or what we think a regulation is in the first place. There is a tremendous need for law to change and the required work might seem overwhelming, but Indy puts us back on track and reminds us that there are examples of gigantic systemic change.

We also cover some big topics like democracy and talk about the need for creating better legal concepts and models, such as property right or legal personhood, to transform governance.

Indy Johar is focused on the strategic design of new super scale civic assets for transition – specifically at the intersection of financing, contracting and governance for deeply democratic futures.

Indy is co-founder of darkmatterlabs.org and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00 – https://www.architecture00.net, a founding director of open systems lab – https://www.opensystemslab.io (digitising planning), seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) – https://www.wikihouse.cc  and Open Desk (open source furniture company) https://www.opendesk.cc.

Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub https://bloxhub.org (Denmark Copenhagen) – the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization and was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University.  He was also 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. 

Most recently, he was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022.