About Us

In a context of climate breakdown and technological disruption, Dark Matter Labs focuses on accelerating societal transition towards a climate-neutral and regenerative economy, collective care, shared agency, long-termism and interconnectedness. Our daily work ranges from policy and regulation to finance and data, from governance and democratic participation to organisational culture and identity.

We organise our work around what this transition needs, and the things we want to see in the world. To keep that transparent, we undertake open work in collaborative partnerships to provoke alternative visions of the future, designing how they might look in practice, and experimenting in context to reveal how they could work and enable the necessary change. More about us here.

We currently have legal entities in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, South Korea and Canada with a joint turnover in 2022 of around £3million and a team of around 60.

About This Role

We are looking to recruit one or more talented, Swedish-speaking strategic designer(s) to support our partnership with Viable Cities in Sweden - a national strategic innovation programme with the mission of Climate Neutral Cities 2030 with a good life for all within planetary boundaries. This is a very exciting role for an agile and collaborative person with both relevant experience and an appetite for learning, who is keen to advance answers to the question of how Cities can best be supported to accelerate efforts towards a just climate transition.

Viable Cities and Dark Matter Labs have a long-term and strategic partnership to support each others work in creating the conditions for cities to accelerate their transitions to a climate-neutral, regenerative and equitable future.

One area of collaboration is on System Demonstrators: an approach to support cities and their partners to accelerate the scale and pace of change towards climate neutrality in specific places and/or sectors within a city. The approach is based on experience with other urban innovation programmes and encourages cities to work on a range of connected system-level innovations (e.g. in the realms of regulation, finance, procurement etc), with multiple partners, in a specific place or site(s) in the city (e.g a neighbourhood or street). Finding established and novel ways to finance system demonstrators will be a significant component of the programme. You can find out more about system demonstrators in this Viable Cities White Paper.

The strategic designer will be responsible for working across our two organisations to further develop and provide strategic support to cities that are designing and implementing local system demonstrators through a programme funded by Vinnova and Viable Cities. This work includes programme design, city support and participatory process design, individual city coaching, and learning journey design.

This work sits within our Cities Transition team and is supported by our colleagues working on finance innovation.

In this role your focus will likely be split across some key areas of work:

• Focus Area 1 - Strategic progamme design and management (30%)

  Co-design and operationalisation of system demonstrator support to Swedish local governments and their partners. Manage programme activities and outputs and manage relationships and processes between the two organisations (DML and Viable Cities). This will also involve engaging with other Viable Cities and DML Programmes to identify strategic linkages and co-delivery opportunities.

• Focus Area 2 - City support (coordination and delivery) (50%)

  Provide tailored support to two participating city consortia in local delivery of systems demonstrator activities. Through regular calls, support the teams in process management, identifying and troubleshooting strategic issues, connecting to a range of support options and technical expertise. Build excellent relationships and trust throughout the process.

• Focus Area 3 - City learning journey design and delivery (30%)

  Design and delivery of a strategic learning programme that supports a learning-by-doing approach to capability building by supporting city officials and their partner organisations through cohort-based learning, peer learning, specialist advice and other modalities

We expect that the balance between these areas will regularly shift and rebalance, with an overall split as summarised above. The work has a strong focus on practical execution and it also encompasses reflective practice, process development and learning from other DM and Viable Cities work in cities and related domains.

You Might Thrive In This Role If...

• You care deeply about accelerating cities’ pathways towards climate neutrality and a just transition

• You have experience in working at a strategic level to design and deliver programmes and projects that maximise the potential for systemic impact towards the urban climate transition.

• You are focussed on impact and on designing approaches and methodologies that can meet the needs of partners and implementers in order to accelerate a just climate transition

• You can demonstrate experience working with/in Swedish institutions, especially local and national government, that enable you to understand the Swedish context, ways of working, and the policy and practice landscape around net climate transitions

• You are confident in guiding cities and other partners through complex processes, and in helping them navigate uncertainty and change; you can confidently ‘hold a room’ to ensure cities and partners feel encouraged and supported at all times

• You have a curiosity for, and enjoy learning from the experiences of, practitioners and officials in local governments

• You’re a quick learner, happy and willing to throw yourself into new things and to work them out as you go.

• You're a great communicator and relationship holder and enjoy engaging with many different people

• You have a thirst and appetite for undiscovered work and building what doesn't exist yet

• You're interested in The Boring Revolution

• You're interested to work on how you show up and your own personal development

• You're looking to join an organisation that can deeply challenge and stimulate your thinking and which you'd like to commit to longer-term

Who You Might Work Most Closely With

You'll work closely with:

• Gyorgyi Galik: Co-lead of DM’s cities mission (Location: UK)

• Joost Beunderman: Co-lead of DM’s cities mission (Location: UK)

• Steven Bland: Systems Design Advisor and co-lead for system demonstrators (Location: South Africa)

You will also work closely with colleagues working on missions, projects, dark matter layers, deep code innovations across the DM ecosystem, as appropriate and needed - especially given the importance of the system demonstrator idea in other areas of our work.

Partners You Will Work Closely With

This role is based in Stockholm in the Viable Cities office. The post holder is therefore expected to engage closely with the team at Viable Cities, and will be involved in liaison and sharing activities between the two organisations.

How we work

We're a multi disciplinary and distributed team based around the globe. What's important to us is using the context and local conditions of projects to grow our knowledge and use it to iterate our knowledge and practice across all of our work. We pride learning, experimentation and intuition, and look to provide members of the team ways in which they can grow their own knowledge and practice. We view projects, process and how we work as an evolving design that you would be part of shaping.

Here's a little on how we currently organise:

• We all work remotely, with flexible working hours around schedules (most people do main hours between 9-6).

• We work as self-managing dynamic hierarchies. There aren’t fixed line managers or fixed JDs - we have different areas of expertise and focus and we pick up and shed roles as required. This requires good communication, high emotional intelligence and levels of trust.

• We run on a series of digital tools that we use daily to coordinate. We check daily to say good morning/afternoon/evening and talk about what we're learning,

• We're organised in multidisciplinary working groups that span mission, deep codes, projects and ops blocks. Each working group is flexible and spans a series of projects to form a portfolio work.

• This setup allows us to be a platform organisation and to nurture and grow ideas the team are passionate about, and align advance our core values and mission,

• In time and experience, we invite everyone to grow our portfolio of work as a way to grow our collective skills, knowledge, and ideas – this is an invitation, not an obligation.

You will be supported by the wider Dark Matter Labs team (currently circa 60 around the globe) and connect with them remotely on a day-to-day basis. We also engage regularly for joint learning and development which include:

• DM download – a regular meet up (usually online) to share learning across key areas of our work.

• Reflections - a chance to collectively reflect on what we are learning, how we are showing up and what we are sensing

• Personal development and learning sessions - org-wide sessions for us to take leadership in our own personal development; including building our muscles of self-reflection and the characteristics required for trust.

• Virtual, hybrid and face-to-face gatherings

Your Background

For us, equally important to your background is your confidence and ease in working at the frontier of what is known, your dexterity in questioning how things are done and proactiveness in counteracting the status quo through active practice.

That is why we are open to what your background might be: there is no stereotype education or career pathway for this position. Ideally your background would combine several of the following areas of experience, which might make the learning curve easier and make you an asset for our team:

• Work with/in local governments: experience working inside or as a partner to Swedish local administration and politics towards change. Understanding of the underlying challenges faced by these actors and how change in institutional structures, processes and mindsets can unfold as well as create impact. Specific experience or knowledge of municipal finance and investments is a bonus.

• Strategic and systems design: experience in designing and delivery change in complex ecosystems and organisations; in providing strategic thinking and reframing opportunities by facilitating the emergence of compelling new narratives. Ability to make sense of dynamic and complex spaces of operation, to think beyond existing economic, social and organisational paradigms.

• Multi-stakeholder collaboration in urban context: experience enabling and facilitating conversations across disciplines and sectors; sustaining alignment between actors with different, potentially conflicting interests. Sensemaking with multiple stakeholders to articulate a common vision and impactful actions for sustainability. Designing processes for engagement including learning journeys, workshops, peer to peer learning and others

We highly value lived experience as a form of expertise and we consider having a broad and diverse range of lived experience within the team, as being critical for us to be able to do our best possible work together and to create a range of spaces and accommodate a broad spectrum of life experience into our planetary team.

Dark Matter Labs continues to educate, question and critically review ourselves on how we can improve. We recognise and celebrate the true value of a safe and accepting working environment that - among other things - a diverse team with distributed power can unlock, and work to address our underlying biases and power structures that can prevent that from materialising.

This type of work requires the willingness to work on yourself, your relationships with power, the assumptions and experiences that influence how you think, and more.*

*We recognise that our work deals with some existential questions and content that can be triggering. We have a team focused on the team's mental health and personal development and we continue to incrementally build the necessary psychological infrastructures for this work.

Equality & Diversity

We are committed to providing equal opportunities for all. Applications are welcomed from all sections of the community and we would particularly welcome applicants from Black, Asian, Mixed or non-white ethnicities, to ensure that our internal team represents some of the diversity in the cities we are designing for. Decisions are made on merit with independent assessments, openness and transparency of process.

We know that there is more that we can do to make this recruitment more accessible, particularly if you have experienced exclusion, disadvantage or discrimination, or if you have particular accessibility needs. We would be happy to provide any further support that you may require - please get in touch so that we can work together to provide that.

Pay

You’ll be paid according to our company pay formula, which is the same for everyone on the team

Formula = (((Years experience + 23) + (8.82 for freelancers)) *1000) = gross pro rata pay in GBP.

Years experience includes all experience after school completion age (18) - inc work, education, unpaid work (care, volunteering, etc).

We have recently put in place a range of benefits support across the team, including coaching, learning funds, sabbatical and secondment support, learning funds, workspace funds and more. These were set collectively by the team and vary according to statutory provisions in different geographies - we’ll be happy to confirm the relevant approach for your geography and contract type.

We'd love to share with you why we organise in this way, and about how we expect this to evolve. Every team member plays a role in the collective setting of our pay, benefits, care, and support structures to enable us all to do our best work.

Our holiday policy is a minimum of 28 days/year pro-rata, but we encourage you to take all of the time that you need to properly rest.