Founder’s Story
Professor Kyle Talbott
For most of my career, I believed I could do the work that mattered from within existing institutions. I’ve spent decades teaching university architecture students, working alongside professionals in practice, and helping young designers find their footing in a complex field. I love this work, and I remain deeply committed to it.
Over time, however, a quiet discomfort began to grow.
Living simultaneously as an educator and a practitioner gave me a clear vantage point. I could see where architectural education succeeds, and where it falls short. I watched students arrive at university with genuine curiosity and idealism, only to see that curiosity quickly narrow. Education moved rapidly toward technique, software, precedent, and performance. Students learned how to do architecture long before they were given space to ask why. Questions about meaning, ethics, aspiration, and personal fit were treated as secondary, even though they were already shaping every decision students were making.
A career became a sequence of boxes to check, rather than a lifelong journey guided by individual values and goals.
I also noticed how rarely students were allowed to experience architecture as it is actually lived: as a series of complex human situations involving clients, missions, teams, money, uncertainty, and tradeoffs. Too often, students were asked to choose career paths before they understood the professional landscape itself. A career became a sequence of boxes to check, rather than a lifelong journey guided by individual values and goals.
At the same time, my professional work was revealing something else. The most meaningful architectural moments rarely came from stylistic flourishes or technical sophistication alone. They came from empathy. From careful listening. From understanding human experience at a granular level. From decisions that honor people, not just projects.
The most meaningful architectural moments come from empathy, careful listening, and decisions that honor people.
Yet our educational systems rarely taught students how to practice sound judgment, navigate ethical tension, or understand architecture as shaped by choices that genuinely matter to people.
In response, I began experimenting with different ways of teaching. I built simulations instead of assignments. I created complex scenarios instead of simplified exercises. I asked students to make decisions, live with consequences, reflect, and try again. I invited open conversations about fear, ambition, doubt, and purpose – subjects often invisible in formal education, yet always present beneath the surface.
I built simulations instead of assignments. I created complex scenarios instead of simplified exercises.
The results were striking. Students became more engaged. They began to see architecture not as a visual style to be perfected or a technical formula to be optimized, but as a meaningful practice to be inhabited. Many found a reassuring clarity about their path. They left the experience grounded and empowered, and I realized I had discovered a way to satisfy a fundamental student need.
The Human Centered Architecture Institute grew out of this realization.
I founded HCAI to create a place where architecture can be explored before students are locked into costly, high-stakes university commitments. A place where reflection is a core skill, not an afterthought. A place where learning mirrors the complexity of real practice – hands-on, imperfect, human, and meaningful.
HCAI exists for students who want more than a checklist, for educators who sense something essential is missing, and for practitioners seeking deeper alignment between their work and their values. I founded it because architects have an opportunity – perhaps now more than ever – to rehumanize the discipline and reclaim their role as cultural leaders shaping a more humane world.
Teaching Team
Professor Talbott personally leads the delivery of HCAI’s educational programs. He is supported by a small, highly intentional team of teachers, facilitators, and research assistants who share responsibility for designing, delivering, and interpreting the simulation-based environments at the heart of our courses.
Together, the HCAI teaching team builds open-ended narrative worlds that students inhabit as the heroes of their own professional stories. Within these simulations, students “try on” different futures that might resonate with them: leading a boutique firm designing luxury hotels, working in a large practice focused on affordable housing, serving as an office manager committed to staff wellbeing, or acting as a designer trying to balance a client’s competing priorities.
The HCAI teaching team builds open-ended narrative worlds that students inhabit as the heroes of their own professional stories.
As students live these simulated professional lives, they encounter the same questions that shape real careers: What does success mean? How should money, collaboration, creativity, and personal life be balanced? What happens when values collide? Rather than addressing these questions abstractly, students confront them through action, consequence, and guided reflection.
This approach demands a very different kind of teaching.
Simulation-based learning requires the careful design of complex, evolving environments – each authored in advance, tested, calibrated, and actively facilitated as it unfolds. Student decisions shape what happens next, requiring continuous interpretation, feedback, and judgment from educators who understand both the professional realities being modeled and the developmental needs of students.
At HCAI, the teaching team exists to make this kind of learning possible. Their role is not simply to teach architecture, but to steward experiences that help students discover how – and why – they want to practice it.