Alex, Robert, and Moe: what is Dixon & Moe?

Dixon & Moe is a digital strategy, design, and development consultancy based in San Francisco. It is the only digital agency that we know of whose founding team consists of three trained architects.

We do a lot of work for clients in the architecture, engineering, and real estate industries. We’ve also worked with startups and institutions like MIT.

What instigated your move from architecture to the technology sector?

We all met through the graduate architecture programs at MIT and the University of Michigan. Even with our frequent all nighters, we somehow found time to do side projects and hackathons together, which helped drive our growing collaboration over the years. The three of us knew we wanted to start a business, but we knew starting our own architecture practice would probably take an eon. Most architects work at an established firm for 10–15 years, then pilfer a few clients to bootstrap their own firm. We were not about to wait around for that to happen.

Another contributing factor was the conceptual freedom that we experienced in architecture school, something that is definitely lost when you move to the professional world. Software, we realized, still offered a bit more experimentation and personal creativity than architecture did in a real world context.

To us the speed of the tech sector is really exciting — the rate at which products are launched, the rate of innovation, and the sheer scale it touches. We all went into architecture to design systems and build physical environments to have a positive impact on society. The transition to tech was obvious when we realized we could accomplish those same goals through software. We still consider ourselves architects, just not in the traditional sense.

We want to get to a point where our products are being used by millions of people — something that could never happen if we stayed in architecture.

What skills from your training in architecture translated well to software design?

We really like having a background in architecture. It gives us a different perspective from other UX designers and developers in the field because we were trained to think at a 10,000 ft view. You have to learn software tools quickly, solve multifaceted problems, and communicate simple solutions to clients who often don’t understand design.

In architecture we were taught to create systems for designing things, not just the things themselves, which has translated really well to designing software.

As architects, we build models to study spaces. A direct analog of this in the tech sector is building prototypes to study software applications. This made the transition all the more natural, as we were able to re-appropriate our iterative and experimental methodologies from physical models to digital products.