Designing Continuity Infrastructure: Intervening on the Scale of Planetary Complexity with Dark Matter Labs

"The globe is on our computers. No one lives there." - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Spivak names a gap between the world we model and the one we live in. Globalism inherits a world measured for human use. Its institutions divide the Earth into territories and its problems among ministries, setting up a course discordant with the planet itself, whose processes cross borders and unfold over centuries. In this workshop, we treat the planet as a series of continuities: flows of matter and energy, and the knots where they converge and change form. A continuity runs across the categories our institutions use to divide responsibility. Where flows like this meet, they form knots, such as a delta or a city, which in turn become concentrations of power. Participants will place themselves inside a continuity and follow it across scales, from a neighbourhood to the planet, and across time, from a season to generations, past, present, and future. We will look for the knots where an intervention carries furthest, and sketch the infrastructure needed to govern a continuity as a party to it.

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The workshop is moderated by Prateek Shankar from Dark Matter Labs, leading global think tank, recognising the complex, entangled reality of living systems and exploring alternative pathways for organising society and stewarding the shared planetary commons. Dark Matter Labs collaborates with international bodies and governments, including the UNDP, EIT Climate-KIC, the Scottish Government, and the Design Museum / Future Observatory.

Prateek Shankar is a strategic designer, writer, and educator whose practice explores how our institutions, governance systems, and ways of knowing must evolve to meet today’s challenges. He is currently Steward (Mission & People) at Dark Matter Labs, where he previously co-led the Planetary Civics mission. He is also a founding member of the Planetary Civics Inquiry. Prateek has spent over a decade working in the fields of international development, ethnographic research, public humanities, and design. He has lectured at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and RMIT University, served as Strategic Design Fellow at the Center for Complexity, and is a Young India Fellow.