Why haven’t we fixed our energy crisis yet? We have the technology, we understand the problem, the root causes, and have a variety of solutions… It’s because the wicked problems of our time aren’t math problems anymore. They’re not waiting on the right technology or a better algorithm. They’re deeply social. That means they are murky, layered, political, historical, and very human.

Take retrofitting, updating existing homes to be more energy efficient. The technology? It exists. But the barriers? They’re in how we organize, finance, govern, and relate to each other. Retrofitting isn’t just about heat pumps and insulation. It’s about money, governance, information, accessibility, and much more…

And maybe, just maybe, we need to start communicating more like ants.

Ant 1 twitched her antenna. Something was off in the west wing of the colony. It was colder than usual, and the fungus garden had wilted.

“Colony-wide energy leak,” muttered Ant 2, scuttling over. “We’ll lose half our winter stock if we don’t act.”

Ant 3 began laying down a trail of pheromones to signal urgency. Ant 4 inspected tunnels. Ant 5 consulted the heat-retaining properties of discarded beetle shells. In minutes, hundreds of ants were moving in tight coordination—each responding to micro-signals from others, collectively reshaping their home. No boss. No blueprint. Just communication, trust, and purpose.

Deborah Gordon calls it “brief interactions.” as she writes in Wired “Ants (…) get things done.”* 

Unlike humans.

Humans try to retrofit homes through top-down contracts, siloed incentives, and techno-fixes that ignore social fabrics. Ants? They communicate. They adapt. They distribute leadership. And maybe, just maybe, we should too.

Jack Minchella didn’t always think in systems. Trained as an architect in Bath and later Copenhagen, he got bored with buildings that looked nice but solved nothing. “Architecture pretends to solve things like housing affordability, but really… it just decorates the problem,” he told me.

So Jack jumped ship. He joined Dark Matter Labs, where the work is less about what things look like and more about how systems feel, function, and fail, especially under pressure.

What began in 2020 as a retrofit initiative across three European cities with partners, quickly evolved into something more complex: a rethinking of governance, power, and the economy through the lens of the humble home. The Dark Matter Labs team looks at life through the lens of interconnections, and so one thing led to another and Jack started to study the problem through the lens of accessibility. “We asked ourselves, “What does it mean to think about having the right to retrofit?”

On paper, retrofitting is simple. Make homes energy efficient. Save money. Save the planet. Voilà ! But in reality, as Jack puts it, “it’s the most complicated thing I’ve ever worked on.”

Why?

Because a home is not just a physical structure. It’s both personal and highly interconnected. It’s political, geographical, economical, and yes, material.  And it’s nested within a web of inequality, broken energy markets, bad governance, and extractive supply chains.

There have been multiple publications over the years about retrofits, usually there’s advice on the best way to decarbonize the UK’s housing stock for example, addressing this as if it was linear, saying do X-Y-Z in this order. It revolves around a certain amount of insulation, and electrification, the type of thermopumps, etc. But none of it takes into account all the kind of side effects that these changes imply, like material availability, quantity, cost, transport, and other elements of the supply chain, the ramifications and implications of all of this, including financing, and other governance and social issues related to it.

In the UK alone, 29 million homes** must be retrofitted by 2050 to meet climate targets. That’s nearly two-thirds of all housing stock. Each one is different. Each one is lived in. And each one is tethered to financial systems that make it nearly impossible for regular people to decarbonize without going broke.

“We’re relying on people to decarbonize themselves,” Jack said. “It’s privatization in disguise. What we’ve learned over the past couple of years is that decarbonization is often framed as this technical challenge, but it’s deeply unequal and unethical.”

For example, we are moving from operational costs, such as fossil fuels that you pay day by day, to capitalized costs, such as solar panels or heat pumps that are physical infrastructures that you need to pay once, but in a very big lump. Such change in financing makes it highly inaccessible for most people. This shouldn’t be so complex and yet it is. Why is that? We have plenty of solutions but we are trying to pin system level change on individuals.

Jack and the team at Dark Matter Labs believe the answer lies in rethinking scale, ownership, and trust.

1. Hyper-local, neighborhood-level retrofits instead of isolated homes.
2. Civic-led governance models to support collective decision-making.
3. City-scale financing, so people aren’t left paying £50k per house alone.
4. Available Soft infrastructure: contracts, templates, governance protocols, that communities can adapt and own.

Deep down, I noticed as I interviewed Jack, this work is about community. What’s missing now on the ground to make this happen? Trust and time to be together, to hear each other and organizations that support at the level of the neighbourhood.

Take one project that Jack participated in, a street in Birmingham: 40 homes, barely connected. Civic Square, a local partner, organized a street party, complete with a recycled fashion parade. Neighbors developed deeper relationships. Then, they co-hosted retrofit assessments. One volunteer babysat while others gathered to hear results. And crucially, they made decisions together.

“It’s just easier when you do it in a group,” Jack said. “You learn more. You help each other. It becomes social, not technical.”

“These things happened in the past I think”, I mentioned to Jack during our zoom conversation, “yes”, he replied. “There was the trade union, working mens club, parents groups… etc. in a sort of previous era when capitalism was working better there was a fabric of social life that, unfortunately as millennials we’ve never experienced. Now people are moving away from their home to get a good job, the impacts of globalization. This is reconnection, and it’s a by-product of our work.” 

Retrofitting touches housing policy, construction, public trust, energy markets, and inequality. And the context keeps shifting—materials, regulations, climate targets. “It’s like solving a puzzle while the pieces are changing,” Jack said.

Also, the team is tiny, and the vision is vast. Some days, Jack admits, “my brain just doesn’t compute how this will ever scale. It feels impossible.” Maybe scaling is not even the right word, this needs to diffuse, spread, like a virus. We can work with small groups and innovate, so that inspires others, that replicates in a way that’s adapted to their context… 

Other days, a shared vote on a retrofit budget in Bristol—where residents choose between upgrades individually or collectively—restores his belief in the social.

At stake is more than warming or cooling homes. It’s about energy justice, economic dignity, and the right to shape our environments.

If we continue to treat energy efficiency as a market product, we’ll deepen inequality, as well as create a new drive for growth and extraction. Those who can afford solar panels, batteries, and heat pumps will opt out of the grid. The rest will be left paying more for less—stranded in homes that are either too hot or too cold, with leaky walls and higher bills.

But if we treat retrofit as a civic right, as infrastructure for health and democracy, we get something else entirely:

• Power (the kind that heats homes, and the kind that lets people decide their future)
• Belonging (a street that throws parties together makes decisions together)
• Resilience (real adaptation, not techno-quick-fixes)

Jack’s journey started with buildings. Now, it’s about bodies, housed, dignified. “The dream?” he paused. “Honestly, I think it’s just… high-quality homes seen as a piece of human infrastructure. Something essential. Not a luxury.”

But more than that, retrofit becomes a way of living together again. A way of remembering we are not ants—but we might want to borrow a few of their tricks.

Communication. Collective sense-making. Trust. And the ability to change course, together.

Retrofitting isn’t a side quest in the climate story. It’s the main stage. It’s where decarbonization meets daily life, on the street, behind the door, in the decision to care for each other’s comfort and capacity.

It’s hard. It’s slow. But maybe, if we listen to the ants (and Jack) we can remember how to solve problems not just technically, but socially. Not alone, but side by side.