I’m excited to announce another awesome addition to the Arcol team.
Joel has spent the last 20 years working in the games industry. We’re super excited to have him join our team and build the future of building design.
Here’s a little from Joel:
I am a programmer, but see myself more as a toolmaker. I’ve been fortunate to work in a variety of creative fields, but the throughline has always been making tools to allow people to use technology to unlock their creativity. I started in animation and VFX for film, working on crowd scenes for Disney’s Mulan, and tools at ILM to help manage lighting and texturing for the Star Wars prequels on shots at a larger scale than the galaxy had ever seen before.
I’ve worked in games, both at AAA and indie studios, on engine features and gameplay to let players experience new worlds, but mostly on the pipelines and tools needed to create those vast worlds within the strict constraints of production schedule, frame-time and console and mobile hardware. At Smule, I helped to build apps and experiments that allowed anyone to express themselves through music regardless of their musical background, and have explored tools to help structure stories and break through creative block with tools such as The Brainstormer app.
I’m excited to join Arcol, I love the focus on using collaboration and modern technologies to empower architects and designers. The challenges remind me of the most rewarding ones from games and VFX, with the tension between creative freedom and the real-world constraints of construction and engineering. The best moments in my career have always been when someone else uses a tool that I helped build to create something far beyond what I imagined the tool capable of: it’s always unexpected and yet strangely inevitable. I can’t wait to see what kinds of highlights we can enable people to create in architecture.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, a core part of my thesis for building Arcol is to focus on having a small, lean team that is incredibly talented.
We are extremely patient in hiring for Arcol, getting to work with incredible people like Joel is what makes it worth it.