Designing,
The Human Layer
of the Future

‍

Most thinking about the future
is a forecast. Mine is a design brief.

I've spent 20 years building the places where societies gather: World Expo pavilions, cultural districts, worlds made for millions. The future arriving with AI is being designed right now, mostly by people who don't realise that's what they're doing. The question I put to a room is the one the whole conversation keeps dodging.
‍
What kind of society are we actually building, and who gets to decide?

A practitioner's view of the future

I'm Tommy Lexén, Creative Strategist and Cultural Futures Adviser. Speaker and writer. Founder of Frank Kelly Consultancy.

Most futures are not chosen. They accumulate, through hundreds of reasonable decisions made inside briefs too narrow to hold what they add up to. Societies rarely drift because one person makes one disastrous call. They drift by default, while everyone is being sensible.
‍
The good news sits in the same mechanism. Nobody could have planned The Beatles, or Spotify, or a child in England dancing to K-pop a generation later. But somebody planned the conditions that made them possible. That is what designing a society actually looks like, and we are making the next set of those decisions right now.

There is a point where you can see the drift, and once you can, it stops being someone else's decision. I call it the End of Innocence. What gets built now is a choice, and the people with the most power to shape it are already in the rooms where the next generation of shared environments is being imagined and built.

That is who this is for. The designers, cultural leaders, planners and technologists doing the work, most of whom have never been asked to think at that scale. The platform exists to widen the brief before the next society is built for us.
‍
What we build now is no longer someone else's decision.

What I do

I work on one question across everything: what kind of society we are building as culture, technology and experience collapse into a single space, and who gets to decide. The decisions being made right now will shape the next decade, and most are being made by default, inside briefs too narrow to see their consequences.

I'm frank about that, on stage, on the page and in the room. If something won't work, I say so early, while there's still time to change course. If something could be brilliant but is losing its edge, I say that too. That honesty is the through-line, and it takes three forms:

‍Speaking, Writing, and Advising.
‍

Speaking...

I speak to conferences, leadership teams and cultural institutions about the future as something we design, not something we wait for. Drawing on twenty years inside the work and two centuries of historical evidence, I give a room a sharper read on the decisions in front of it, and a reason to believe it holds more power over what comes next than the headlines allow. The register is confident, evidence-led and properly entertaining, shaped to the audience and built to leave people thinking differently about the choices they are already making.

Keynotes, guest lectures and in-conversation sessions, from main-stage conferences to boardrooms and universities.

Writing a Book...

The Undesigned Future is a big-ideas book about the layer the AI debate keeps missing: the trust, belonging and cultural infrastructure that hold a society together. It travels from predictive policing databases to cosplay at comic cons, from a cellist playing a 1752 instrument in front of a Metallica mosh pit to a Soviet psychology experiment that became 'The Traitors'. Across two centuries of evidence and twenty years inside the work, the same pattern keeps appearing: societies drift when hundreds of reasonable decisions are made inside briefs too narrow to account for what they are collectively producing.

In progress.

Advising...

I help entertainment companies, cultural organisations and global brands navigate what comes next. The decisions being made about culture, experience and society right now will shape the next decade. Most organisations are reacting to them. The ones I work with get ahead of them. Through Frank Kelly Consultancy, I embed with leadership teams, bring two decades of pattern recognition across entertainment, culture and large-scale experience, and say early what is working and what is not, while there is still time to change course.

Exec-ready direction and work that lasts through
‍Purpose, Passion, Impact.

My track record

Why This Perspective Matters

I'm a future-focused creative and cultural leader specialising in long-term strategy, innovation and futures thinking. I'm the founder of Frank Kelly Consultancy and former Managing Director and Chief Creative Strategist at Immersive International 2019-2025, one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in the World.

Whilst at Immersive I led work across both the Dubai and Osaka World Expos, permanent cultural destinations in Asia and giga-projects in the Middle East. In parallel I co-founded ROARR, a world-record-breaking, purpose-driven entertainment platform that launched at Mosi-oa-Tunya (Victoria Falls), Zambia.

I'm also a Fellow of the RSA, was Senior Creative Adviser to the UN Science-Policy-Business Forum 2022-2023, and have studied the Art and Science of Futures Thinking at Cambridge University.

Before Immersive I was a Senior Producer at the Tony and Olivier award-winning 59 Productions, where my work included Palace in Motion at Qasr Al Watan Abu Dhabi, the (then) largest permanent projection-mapping show created, and Grenfell: Our Home, Channel 4's first VR documentary, alongside productions for the Metropolitan Opera New York, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art and the Royal Opera House Muscat.

I'm originally trained in film production, as a screenwriter and theatre practitioner. As Artistic Director of BeFrank Theatre Company 2011-2015, I wrote and produced work including Like Enemies of the State and The Point of No Return, both exploring political violence, identity and collective meaning at moments of societal rupture. That early experience, in what holds societies together and what tears them apart, is the thread that runs into the work today.