What is your name, current location, and current occupation?
Tyler Crain
Oakland, California
Architectural Product Design
What was your affiliation with MIT?
M.Arch Graduate, 2011-2015
What was your thesis title?
Disturbance Grounds: An Inquiry Into Non-Equilibrium Architectural States
What are you doing today?
In 2022, I began work at an architectural products company. I have been working on developing a modular indoor wall/room system and will be helping to plan new initiatives for future research and development.
Do you think your career path has been unorthodox or nontraditional?
Yes. I think my original goal coming out of undergraduate was a relatively direct path to becoming a practicing architect, with perhaps a focus on custom fabrication and computational design approaches. I've certainly taken a few turns along the way.
After graduate school at MIT I went on to work for a visualization company in New York called March to create high-end visual marketing assets for real estate development projects. I did this for a few years working some freelance as well. This eventually brought me a little deeper into the tech side of CG, where I worked for about 4 1/2 years with computer vision engineers at a startup, called AiFi, that develops automated retail software. With this company I helped develop simulated environments for training AI models, designed weight sensing hardware, camera hardware concepts, and built the world's first fully automated small format modular stores. I sold and managed the deployment of many of our first projects while helping to build out a more scalable deployments pipeline. Over the past few years the company has rolled out around 80 automated stores around the world and has grown from about 16 employees when I started to about 110 employees.
I moved on in mid-2022 to my current employer, KOVA Products, where I work in the R&D group developing new architectural products. This has brought me back more into the AEC world after a few years at sort of an arm's length.
How did your time at MIT affect your career path?
I gained exposure to a lot of different topics and talented colleagues. It has helped open up an amazing professional network and has given me confidence to pursue unique trajectories in my career.
What are you excited about in your career field today?
Solving tough, multi-disciplinary problems that improve future outlooks for the planet.
What is advice you would give to a new alum coming out of MIT?
During MIT...
Work on developing clear direction for your work, the problems you want to solve and how you uniquely solve them. It is so hard to carve out this kind of free time for exploration later in your career. There are a lot of ambitious personalities at MIT with their own agendas.They compete for your time and attention - this can lead you to be pulled in so many different directions that you lose sight of developing your own agenda and voice.
Take advantage of this great time you are in, uninhibited by years of expertise (yours, colleagues or consultants around you). That is a great creative advantage to solving problems with more creative approaches.
After MIT...
Work with diligence and passion, but also remember to balance your life in ways that give you the right perspective, inspiration, and sustained mental energy to continue to do good work throughout your career. I think graduate school can have a tendency to upset this balance for a while.
What are you trying to learn right now?
Product development and real estate development
How can fellow alums reach you if they want to speak further?
tc@tylercrain.com or LinkedIn