"i can architect UX Design"
stories of former architects and their journey into ux design..
architecture to ux design
We had the fortunate opportunity to interview Blake Hudelson in January of 2022.
We asked him questions about his background in architecture, his transition into
UX Design, and his advice.
blake hudelson
UX Designer, CoFounder of Architechie & BoomPop
We would love to learn a little bit more about your background. Where did you study architecture? Did you work for any firms? And your transition between being an architect to now this tech guy.
I did my undergrad at California Polytechnic State University and my grad program at CCA – California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
I worked for a couple of years at various firms. I worked at SOM for a couple of years, a smaller firm called STUDIOS Architecture in San Francisco. And then I realized that the traditional practice of architecture was not right for me in a lot of ways which I’m happy to go into detail, but the punchline is that I decided to try other things outside of architecture which was – I thought the most interesting and closest thing was -- UX Design and Product Design.
That was around 2015, and I had some friends who had made that transition before me. My buddy who studied at GSD and then worked at Sampson as an interactive designer after a short career as an architect post school. He kind of mentored me a little bit and helped give me some tips. Honestly it wasn’t that hard. Granted it was not as competitive to get product design jobs as it is today, so I will say that I was advantaged in that a little bit. There was a huge amount of demand for product designers and very little supply so I was able to kind of jump in really quickly.
I started working at this design agency in San Francisco - working in the intersection of industrial design and interaction design. I worked there for a year and that’s what kind of accelerated my career in tech. And then I went to another agency called Method – which is like an IB design consultancy – worked there for a couple of years. Went to Google at this small R&D group at Google called Google ATAP with a focus on kind of like moon shot projects emerging technologies where we worked on this specific project called Jacquard, which was this kind of new paradigm of physical computing.
Then from there I went out and started working on my own things, starting my own companies and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing ever since. I run my own company now called Boombox based in San Francisco and I teach as an adjunct professor at CCA where I went to grad school. I teach an industrial design program and interaction design program there. And I run Architechie as kind of a little side gig just for fun. And I’m getting more into real estate investment to kind of itch my physical design itch that I had from architecture – that’s how I kind of keep busy.
"I recommend people continue to study architecture because it’s a great education and then go do something else."
"you have a lot of really great skills that you wouldn’t get from studying other things."
"I can always leave and try something else and always come back to architecture if it doesn't work."
"the hardest thing for me was the peer pressure."
"if you're not liking what you're doing, do something else."
"I want to be able to say, look, i tried things and i may have failed. Some things didn't work out in some cases but because i tried things it opened new doors."
"i wanna be making good money, i want to have a good healthy work life balance, and i wanna be really excited about the work that i'm doing."
"the moment i started hanging out outside of the architecture circle... really expanded my purview and made me realize there's a lot to the world that I just wasn't seeing yet."
Did you have to go to school or do any sort of program to become a UX designer?
I thought about going to a boot camp or general assembly but honestly after looking at the curriculum I realized that having two degrees in design I knew most of it. I read a couple books, a bunch of blog articles and that kind of sufficed. I realized it wasn’t worth the $15,000 or whatever they were going to charge me, where I can just self teach.
Do you think studying architecture helped you transition the skills to UX/Product Design?
Oh yeah. Here’s what I recommend, I recommend people continue to study architecture because it’s a great education and then go do something else. Like, if I were to give any advice. Study architecture, Don’t practice architecture. Because you leave architecture school with such a broad set of skills: you can draw, you can make physical things, you can think in really big complex systematic ways, you can learn how to work extremely hard, you can learn how to communicate well, you can learn how to work with other disciplines. So many things you can learn in architecture school and that’s really conducive to going and working in various fields that aren't traditional practice, whether it’s filmmaking, graphic design, VR/AR, environmental design, UX design, entrepreneurship. You’re well equipped with a lot of the skills you learn in architecture. It’s not going to be a perfect path or a perfect 1:1 but you have a lot of really great skills that you wouldn’t get from studying other things.
You said that after working for SOM or anything, you realized traditional architecture wasn’t your thing. Like, why? How did you get that realization?
I think I can almost zero it down to a specific day where I had this aha moment when I was looking around. There were 250 people in the SOM office in San Francisco – that was like the top of the food chain. You get into that office and you’re like, you can’t really go above that. SOM is an extremely well respected firm. I got there pretty early in my career and I was looking around and I was surrounded by just the most talented people in the world, you know, people who’ve gone to top universities who can work anywhere they want. They could start their own firms but they chose to be working there. And a lot of them had been there for four, five, six years and they hadn’t even gotten their first promotion yet. They’re still not at that associate level. And I was like man, I’m not about to wait around for another four years to get my first promotion for more responsibility.
Being in San Francisco, you’re just surrounded by everybody just hustling and building stuff and being at the epicenter of technology. You see companies like Uber, Apple, AirBnB, the world’s best companies and all of your friends are working for these companies and I was just like, man.. What I’m doing is:
1) slow,
2) I’m frankly not that excited about my day-to-day work,
3) My pay sucks. San Francisco is expensive. You gotta make money to survive here,
4) I’m working my a** off and I’m not getting compensated as good as my friends who are working six hour days at AirBnB or something, half the time getting paid 3 times as much as I am.
5) It’s a really competitive and saturated field to work in. I think a lot of employers just take advantage of people who are young and fresh out of school. Like especially people who are on an H1V visa who feel like they can’t leave their job because they’re employer’s sponsoring them.
It was just a combination of all of these things. And I was like man, I don’t want to be here 10 years thinking I should have left 8 years ago. And I can always leave and try something else and always come back to architecture if it doesn’t work. I was fortunate enough that 1) I had a girlfriend at the time who could pay my rent if I couldn’t make a salary, 2) I wasn’t on a visa so I wasn’t dependent on an employer. I had all these things set up so I had very little risk. So I said, hey I’m going to try to leave for 3 months and if I can’t get a job in tech in 3 months I’ll go back to my job at SOM or figure something out in architecture and so it was very low risk for me.
And honestly the hardest thing for me was the peer pressure. Like, I was only friends with most architects. That’s all we talked about. When I had studied for 8 years in school I had student debt. When I told my family and my friends that I wanted to go do this new thing called UX Design, leaving one of the most generative fields in the world, like what are you doing? That’s crazy! You spent so much time getting here, now you’re just going to leave it? So, honestly that was actually the hardest thing was those kinds of conversations where people were not understanding why I would leave a really well respected job and field. But I knew in my heart, this was not something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And my perspective, whatever you’re doing is, if you’re not liking what you’re doing, do something else. So I just decided I needed a change of pace and I wasn’t going to be happy where I was.
I definitely agree that sometimes you don’t feel passionate about the work you’re doing. So it’s relieving that this degree can set you up for other things that you can find a passion towards. So it’s really nice to hear somebody say that.
Early on in my career I kind of came to this flawed conclusion that either 1) you can make a lot of money doing something and be unhappy, or as an architect you can go 2) work for a top firm and frankly make really bad money because they can take advantage of you because they can hire anybody. 3) And work your a** off and not have a life outside of work and be kind of unhappy in your job.
I was like man, there’s gotta be a way where I can have all three. I wanna be making good money, I want to have a good healthy work life balance, and I wanna be really excited about the work that I’m doing. And until I have those three things, I’m not going to be happy with myself. You have to have conviction. Those paths exist in the world which a lot of architects, I think they see what their colleagues are doing and their like well this is how things are, I guess I’m going to be miserable in architecture for the rest of my life.
But the moment that I started hanging out outside of the architecture circle and going and meeting people who were entrepreneurs, who were product designers, who were software engineers, who were UX researchers that really expanded my purview and made me realize there’s a lot to the world that I just wasn’t seeing yet. So that was the other kind of advantage of just being geographically located in San Francisco because you’re literally in the center of it all. Everybody’s working on cool stuff. And honestly, I felt left out and I wanted to work on other cool products that were impacting billions of people. Like when you work on big software products and I realized that I could either 1) design the buildings that these innovations were going to occur in or 2) I could just go work on the innovations themselves as a product designer.
It’s kind of exciting to hear that from someone else who’s been through that. It also kind of relates because it’s hard for us [architecture students]. We’re both passionate about something else, something more. But it’s really nice and relieving to hear that from you.
This is totally disconnected from architecture conversation. This is just like the way that I look at life, the very worst thing I can imagine when I’m old looking at my career is having regret. I don’t want to have regret. And I want to be able to say, look, I tried things and I may have failed, some things didn’t work out in some cases but because I tried things it opened new doors. And so that was the biggest thing for me. I didn’t want to sit around and be unhappy in what I was doing. Again, I feel very privileged to be able to have a lot of things to set me up to be able to make that choice because I know a lot of people don’t have that. I totally recognize that. But I think that that’s a great thing about where we are today in today’s society. Like, we won the lottery jackpot of being able to go to school in the United States and hopefully have good supporting families and get us to a point where we’re educated, we have optionality, and that it’s up to us to try different things. That’s honestly what drove all of this is that deep sinking feeling inside of me that I know I can do other things and do it really well. And I’m not going to go down not trying.
"you have to believe in yourself and believe that you can do big things in the world, and you're not going to limit what people have labeled you to do."
What specific skills would you say transferred really well from architecture to starting your entrepreneurial journey and your whole tech design?
I was pretty savvy with picking up software and that really helped. I think most people who’ve gone to architecture school within the last 10 years I’m sure it’s the same way. I’m also a pretty good visual and graphical designer. I had a good visual sense, a good graphic sense so I was able to prototype things really quickly. I was able to design websites and apps and whatnot. And I realized that I wasn’t going to go work at Google on day one as my dream job. Like I had to work up to it and get some job experience – it’s really just that simple. So I was like, what do companies need? What are companies hiring for these days? Well, they need designers who can design really awesome websites and apps, so like let me go do that. That’s where I started, and then over time I got more sophisticated experimental in the work that I was doing in interaction design and then I was able to go get my dream job working R&D at Google but it didn’t happen on day one, I had to get experience, so:
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Having graphic acuity was really helpful.
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Being a good communicator. I already had a bunch of job experience, I had two degrees, I knew how to speak, communicate, and write well. That will help you in any case.
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Working really hard. I just work harder than 99% of the people around me and I think I really got that from going to architecture school, just having that drive.
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Time management. That’s not something you necessarily learn in school but it’s something that I felt over time I got pretty good at that helped me.
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Ambition, frankly, not something taught in school but I think you have to believe in yourself and believe that you can do big things in the world and you’re not going to be limited to what people have labeled you to do. Because you went to architecture school, you’re going to go do this. I said screw that, I’m going to do what I want to do and I had the skills and the drive to go do those things.
"you don't just flip a switch and go from architect to ux designer. but i feel like they're close enough, that the gap is small enough that if you spend a few months really going heads down and deep, you can learn anything."
"and right now we're so fortunate as humans because we're living at the best time ever in the history of the world, where you can learn anything you want basically for free."
When you were interested in UX Design, going to work in that career field in the beginning, was that kind of difficult because you didn’t necessarily have a background in it?
Not gonna lie, I had some stressful times. It was very much like fake it till you make it type of thing. I knew that none of it was like secret sauce. It just takes some time to learn the ropes. Like there’s a new Lexicon that you need to understand when you’re going and working in tech. I remember the first couple of interviews I had were pretty rough frankly. People were asking like, how do you create a new app in android versus IOS? And I was like, I never done it before, can’t answer that.
So like, yeah it was tough not going to lie. You don’t just flip a switch and go from architect to UX Designer, but I feel like they're close enough that the gap is small enough that if you spend a few months really going heads down and deep, you can learn anything. And right now we’re so fortunate as humans because we’re living at the best time ever in the history of the world where you can learn anything you want basically for free. Like we have the internet, and if you’re interested and ambitious and willing to spend the time you can learn anything you want for free and that’s just crazy. And so I just read a lot, frankly, I read books, I read articles, I networked, I met people for coffee, I asked questions, I tried things. You’d be really surprised that in a short amount of time, I was able to get enough knowledge that could actually be useful and helpful as a UX Designer.
And then obviously, once I got into the workforce I was just a sponge. I was just looking over my colleagues shoulders, how did you do that? What software's are you using? How did these things come together? And I was just really curious. And having a sort of curiosity is sort of critical to doing anything but especially in the technology field, experimentation and doing things in new ways is really encouraged which is kind of the opposite in architecture.
Architecture is like, do things the way things are done. This is the way you have been doing things for 10,000 years. Don’t question how this is done. Whereas in software and tech it’s like oh! You wanna approach this new way? Great! Let’s try it. And so it’s like a 360 from architecture or 180 really. I really love that about software. It’s malleable, you can change it over time. People will listen to you if you have new ideas about how to do something or how to approach executing on an idea. And even though I didn’t start out as an expert, people automatically were like: Okay, you have a based-on set of knowledge of how the design process works, that’s fine, you can learn from there.
So I came in with a really open mind and said hey give me anything you have and I’ll take it and I’ll do whatever I can to figure it out. Not going to lie, there were a lot of nights where I was like what does this mean? I’m going to Google this out and over time I was able to figure things out.
"I'll do whatever it takes to be successful..."
"I was fortunate to find a firm that was willing to take a chance on me."
Yeah, I guess that kind of brings me up to my next question. How did you convince the people at Google and at the other companies that you as an architect could be successful working in technology?
By the time I got to Google, I had plenty of product design and UX experience under my belt so I actually didn’t have any discussion about any of my background in architecture. It was the first job that was the hardest. I told them, hey, I have:
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3D skills
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2D skills
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I’m a good communicator
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I have hustle
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I have good ambition
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I can help bridge the gap between the industrial design physical work that you’re doing as a firm and the digital work. I can kind of sit at the intersection of those things.
…And look I’ll do whatever it takes to be successful so you should hire me. And that didn’t work for everybody but there was one firm that I think got it and they were like:
Oh okay, this kid doesn’t have all the experience or knowledge but it seems like he has enough to be valuable and to learn so let’s take a chance on it. They just hired me for a 3-month contracting start just to test me out and after that 3 months I had to prove myself and then they hired me full time. It was pretty low stakes for them because it was an initial contracting gig. If I wasn’t good they could always say hey this isn’t working out kind of thing. I was fortunate to find a firm that was willing to take a chance on me.
I guess we can end off with what you are doing now. So you run your own company. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
About a year and a half ago, I ended up landing at this adventure studio or start-up studio called Atomic which is based in San Francisco, the head office is in Miami. Atomic is basically a company that builds other companies. It’s called a start-up studio because they start other start-ups and last year Atomic started 12 different companies in all different types of industries: health, WEB3, architecture/engineering software, entertainment, music. Basically it’s a part venture capital fund and part start-up, and it takes the part venture money and it starts to invest in these different smaller portfolio companies and they’re constantly trying to start new ideas until something actually lands – it works. Then they give that money and people to really grow a business.
So I started at Atomic and I started actually building three early staged companies in parallel. And one of those companies ended up turning into BoomPop, which is what I run fulltime today. And it started kind of in the beginning of the pandemic. We realized that every company became a real company overnight and companies were frankly terrified and they didn’t know what to do. We had this idea of starting this marketplace with people who hosted really amazing experiences online, such as: comedians, fitness instructors, wine tasting where they ship wine and you get on a zoom call and they talk to you about the wine while you’re drinking at home. So basically bringing really cool experiences to your home, so you can get on a call with your co-workers and all do an activity together. There’s this obvious need that companies really want to have these activities for their employers to come together, have fun, have some social activity while everyone is stuck at home. And we started out as a virtual events marketplace where we brought – on the supply side – really amazing hosts from around the world with – the demand side – companies that wanted to have their employees do stuff.
That’s where we started, and that was a year and a half ago. We started out just focused on being hyper-focused on virtual events and now we’re growing outside of that doing a bunch of other cool things. We’re doing gifting now where you can send a gift to anybody in the world really easily with a few clicks, and we curate this from really cool boutique businesses around the US and if you want to send a set of gifts to your family for the holidays or your co-workers if you’re working somewhere, you can come to BoomPop and really quickly, using our software be able to select what you like and then send it out and we take care of the rest – all of the fulfillment. Once somebody receives a BoomPop gift, the out of box experience is amazing. It feels like you’re getting an Apple device or something. Everything is super well designed and well considered. That’s another partner business we’re working on.
The larger version is what we’re calling Culture OS (operating system), a piece of software that helps run your culture for your company and keeps employees happy, engaged, and social in doing things. Then we have inputs that go into that, which is like virtual events, personal events, gifting, all these different things. And companies come to us and say:
Hey we have this budget for the year where we want to spend on employee engagement and happiness. What can you do Boombox to help us facilitate those things?
And then with some of our software, some of our manual processes, and our staff we put together a whole plan of what companies can do to do culturally related things for their staff and do it for them. That’s what we do. We’re 35 people now and just about to announce our first major fundraiser which will help us grow as a company and it’s a really exciting time right now.