CELL is a design and strategy consultancy that comes in early — before the brief is locked, before the form is decided, before the first prototype. We bring futures intelligence into the room when the consequential decisions are still open.
The practice spans three domains — Spaces + Interfaces, Stories + Games, and Innovation + Ventures — and operates simultaneously at the level of artifact, world system, and substrate condition. We call this metadesign.
Rachel Joy Victor is a designer, strategist, and worldbuilder with a practice spanning immersive experience design, franchise strategy, AI implementation, and narrative systems. She holds a BS in computational neuroscience and an MS in spatial economics.
Her work has been developed for and with Disney, BBC, Amazon Studios, Meow Wolf, Niantic, Punchdrunk, Ford, Adobe, Nvidia, and Magnopus, among others. She is co-founder of FBRC.ai and teaches at USC School of Cinematic Arts.
The intellectual backbone of the practice draws from continental philosophy, active inference and the free energy principle, enactive cognition, and architectural phenomenology — alongside a sustained engagement with Tamil knowledge systems, kolam mathematics, and fabrication methods across additive, subtractive, textile, and biological domains.
CELL is the client-facing studio practice. It takes a small number of significant engagements each year, prioritising work where the futures context changes the outcome.