Work

NetZeroCities is the support platform for the EU mission to bring 112 European cities to climate neutrality by 2030, funded under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. Working with Dark Matter Labs inside the consortium, the work supports cities developing and implementing the strategies through which they commit to, and organise for, systemic climate transformation. It brings systemic practice to multi-actor and multi-level governance: policy innovation, private-actor coordination, and the enabling conditions on the ground, holding synergies, trade-offs, and interdependencies together in workable governance and portfolio approaches. It spans direct city support and methods that travel across the wider mission.

Nomos applies a systems lens to a hard governance problem: how a complex ecosystem of actors can coordinate itself without being run from the top. Rather than a central authority issuing rules, it lets the participants negotiate, hold, and revise the agreements that govern how they act together, turning distributed and relational governance from an idea into something concrete and usable. Developed with Dark Matter Labs, it is being applied across bioregional and city-scale contexts.

Air quality in Almaty resists single-point solutions: it sits at the intersection of energy, transport, housing, geography, and governance. Working with UNDP in the role at Dark Matter Labs, this explored applying portfolio methodology to the challenge, designing not one intervention but a connected set of experiments and enabling conditions intended to shift the system over time. The approach treats the city as a living system, asking what combination of moves across different domains might build capacity for lasting change rather than a single technical fix the surrounding system would absorb and neutralise.

A study commissioned by Stiftung Mercator on the state of digitally engaged civil society in Germany: where it is maturing, where it is stuck, and what it needs to thrive. It combined ecosystem research with a sharper question, what it actually takes for civil society to be a serious actor in digital policy and infrastructure rather than a downstream recipient of decisions made elsewhere. Published in 2024 as 'Digital Civil Society: A Maturing Field' and presented at re:publica 2025.

ZenDiS, the Centre for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration, is one of the pivotal institutions in Germany's effort to reduce critical dependencies on big tech and strengthen the state's capacity to act on its own terms, developing and stewarding open-source infrastructure for public administration. Beginning as a collaboration with Florida Brand Design, the work moved from narrative toward strategic framing: how digital sovereignty is positioned, how openings and options are understood, and how a young public institution makes sense of itself and its mandate in a fast-moving, increasingly geopolitical field.

Mira is an early-stage GovTech product for innovative public procurement, built by GovMind. The role was interim product lead, responsible for user research, strategy, and product design alongside the founder and a small group of developers. The product was subsequently acquired.

A collaboration with the African Centre for Cities in Cape Town on urban innovation and governance in African city contexts, where the dominant frameworks, mostly written from and for the global North, often fit poorly. The work is research and writing, feeding into a book chapter forthcoming with De Gruyter.

Protocol is an ongoing project on public innovation, co-led with Andreas Pawelke. It pairs a course with a body of writing that step back from the standard toolkit and established methods to ask a sharper question: when is it worth deliberately doing things differently, and what does that look like? It draws on more than a decade of practice and a long lineage of systems thinking, and is less interested in tidy frameworks than in the harder questions underneath them. It runs partly as teaching, through oeffentliche-innovation.de, and partly as published reflection.

RISE Cities, a programme of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, works with cities on resilience under climate and systemic pressure. The contribution combined teaching and advisory: a series of master classes on systems thinking in public administration and design, alongside coaching and mentoring for the participating city teams.

An ecosystem mapping of GovTech in Germany with GovTech Campus Deutschland and the World Economic Forum: who the actors are, where the gaps and dependencies sit, and what dynamics are shaping the field as government technology becomes a more strategic concern.

Berlin's Smart City strategy, run through CityLab Berlin, was as much a question of meaning as of technology: how does a city tell a coherent, honest story about a digital transformation touching everything from administration to public space? The work, with Politics for Tomorrow, was on how the programme was framed and communicated, so that a sprawling, complex effort could be understood by the people it affects and the institutions that have to carry it.

CO:DINA, run with IZT and the Wuppertal Institute, asked what it takes to keep basic public services (Daseinsvorsorge) viable through the twin pressures of digital and ecological transition. The contribution was research and writing on the principles and guardrails for a future-proof provision of essential services, published as part of the programme, carried out in the role as co-lead of Hybrid City Lab.

With The New Institute, the Neue Hanse work explored how cities might govern data as a shared, public resource rather than a private asset or an afterthought, part of a wider inquiry into what cities could be in a post-digital era. Urban data governance is at once technical, legal, and economic, and underneath it a question of power, publicness, and who shapes the conditions of collective life. The project was led by Francesca Bria.

Through the UNLOCK Accelerator with Wikimedia Deutschland, the work addressed how open-knowledge and civic communities innovate and what they need to do it well. It combined accelerator support with research and produced a published output on the future of free knowledge, connecting to a longer thread around the commons: the institutions, infrastructures, and cultures that let people produce and share knowledge outside purely market or state logics.

The Prototype Fund, run by the Open Knowledge Foundation, supports independent developers and small teams building public-interest software. Early on, the work was advisory to the core programme team on communications and the build phase; over the years that followed it grew into coaching well over 150 of the funded teams, through several lenses at once, lean and agile practice, strategy, internal organisation, and user-centred design, helping technically strong teams turn an idea into something that could survive and matter.

Hybrid City Lab began as a spin-off of Zero360, a Berlin strategy firm, tasked with opening a branch into public innovation and public design, a practice for systemic innovation work with urban and public design in high-complexity settings.

Made to Measure, by the documentary collective LAOKOON, is an experiment in what a person's online data can be made to say about them. The team reconstructed a 'digital doppelgänger' of a real person purely from their data traces, asking how much of a life can be inferred, how true that inference is, and who takes narrative ownership once the data speaks for the person. It exists as both a documentary and an interactive website, still live, and stays close to a question of legibility: what gets seen, and who gets to tell the story.

ThingsCon was a conference and community, co-founded and run from 2014 to 2024, dedicated to the responsible and human-centred design of connected technology. Across a decade it gathered designers, technologists, researchers, and activists around the uncomfortable questions raised by the Internet of Things and connected products, well before 'responsible technology' became a common phrase, and produced a long-running series of publications on the state of responsible IoT.

SOAM is a design-research and technology fellowship that brought together an 'unlikely alliance' of researchers and practitioners working at the edges of design, ecology, and systemic thinking. The role spanned the programme team and jury, and mentoring selected fellows through the programme.

Process Festival was co-founded in Dortmund with friends at Florida Brand Design, built around processes of innovation, participation, and public culture, an early experiment in bringing people together around how things are made rather than only what gets made.

Knowable, described at the time as 'a GitHub for the real world', was a tech company co-founded and run for five years across Berlin, London, and the United States. Selected by Seedcamp, it went through five financing rounds and launched two products, exploring the emerging potential of distributed teams for innovation and collaboration.