services fall into two categories:

1

Worldbuilding consultancy for film/tv/game/immersive projects set in speculative futures or alternate realities

I am a worldbuilding consultant specialising in architecture and futures literacy to offer a world-logic review: to avoid tech clichés, tired sci-fi tropes, and EDI pitfalls early, while sharpening spatial detail and everyday ritual.

I help designers, researchers, and filmmakers craft work that brings futures close enough to be felt. For the first time, I’m making my worldbuilding and futures-literacy practice - previously developed and applied within research and academia - available to commercial studios, agencies, independent filmmakers, and designers.

Packages are modular, but availability is capped.

  • Rapid Red-Team Pass (2–3 hours)

    This is the is the low-commitment entry point (great if you are early, unsure, or want a quick sanity check).

  • World Logic Review (1 week)

    This is the right start if you already have a treatment or draft and want a deeper, structured intervention.

  • Embedded Worldbuilding Support (4–8 weeks)

    This can start immediately if you’re in active development (especially series), but it works best if there’s at least a treatment, draft, or clear world premise to work from.

Research-driven process turning ideas of the futures into lived-in worlds:

  • Friendly “outside eye”: rigorous, fast, and constructive (not a theory dump, unless you want it to be)

  • Spatial intelligence: I design futures through space, behaviour, and institutions, not gadgets.

  • Trope + cliché radar: sharp pattern-recognition for what audiences have already seen and what feels done.

  • EDI + consequence literacy: I spot avoidable missteps early and propose stronger alternatives.

  • Film-native translation: I turn research and big ideas into shootable choices (sets, props, routines, dialogue pressure points).

  • Futures literacy: I help your project invite audiences to think, feel, and argue with the future.

Futures and foresight services for… architecture

Across RIBA work stages 0-3, competition entries, tenders and client pitch decks. A sliding scale from:

one-off consultations and document/report reviews

full integration into a design team including research, signal scanning, strategy, attending design review meetings, feeding into and feedback on all documents, reports and applications.

Architecture firms may be eligible for the UK Government Research & Development corporation tax relief scheme in the UK for employing such innovative services | RIBA guidance.

Futures and foresight services for… universities

As a Senior fellow of AdvanceHE and a National Teaching Fellow currently leading the superFUTURES platform at the Royal College of Art I have delivered keynote lectures, workshops and facilitated sessions (for staff and/or students) on:

(Speculative) Futures of (and in) Higher Education, Spatialising Futures, Embedding futures thinking into pedagogy, Curriculum (re)design, Queer Futures, Imagination Literacies, Spatial Storytelling, Pedagogic Readings of Queer Theory and more.

Link to Gem’s academic CV.

Futures and foresight services for… business, agencies, governments, institutes, NGOs

Please contact for expert interviews, advisory board membership, Delphi studies input, expert panel member, research and consultancy services.

Futures and foresight services for… art, design & cultural organisations

Creative design and speculation services for artists and designers including but not limited to one-off consultations and concept reviews, creative writing and storytelling services, research > scenario > design services.

2

Applied spatial futures consultancy for real-world education, policy, practice and place.

This is the ‘real-world’ arm of my practice. It is an applied futures offer that comes in early, at the point where a brief is still being formed and the stakes are still negotiable. I work with architecture practices (including futures residencies and advisory roles), universities, government and NGOs, and arts and cultural organisations to surface the assumptions that quietly organise space.

I am not here to deliver neat solutions. I am here to create productive pressure, reframing briefs, sharpening questions, and opening alternative trajectories through strategic enquiry and design led provocation,.

I work with:

  • Architecture practices (RIBA stages 0–3): Futures residencies and embedded advisory that deliberately unsettle the brief. We interrogate what a project quietly assumes about value, nature, labour, security, mobility, energy, care—and what happens when those assumptions flip. Less “futureproofing”, more future-friction: scenario pressure-tests, provocation-led design reviews, and uncomfortable questions that reshape programme and masterplan logic.

  • Universities: keynotes, curriculum labs, and studio interventions that treat education as a rehearsal space for uncertainty. I work with staff and students to identify where “usefulness” has become a constraint, where curricula reproduce the status quo, and what new forms of spatial imagination, accountability, and world-thinking need to enter teaching now.

  • Agencies, government, institutes, NGOs: advisory roles, interviews, panels and Delphi-style enquiry that push beyond incremental policy horizons. The work surfaces blind spots, names the things institutions can’t easily say, and reframes problems as competing futures—not single-track plans—so decision-making becomes legible, contestable, and ethically argued.

  • Arts, design & cultural organisations: strategic design and concept direction that treats culture as an engine for public questioning. I help develop frames, narratives, and “public prototypes” that make emerging conditions felt—not as answers, but as tensions—so programmes, exhibitions and commissions become sites of debate, not display.