In many ways, language-learning app Duolingo’s new office in New York City doesn’t look like an office at all. Instead of a lobby, there’s a white-wall art gallery exhibiting 6-foot-tall digital paintings of the app’s characters (each language has its own avatar) and a sculpture of Duo, its owl mascot, elevated on a plinth in the center of the room.
Walk through the gallery, and you’re in a minimalist coffee bar with an emerald-green banquette and dozens of pothos plants cascading from the ceiling like chandeliers. Upstairs, there’s a tranquil, university-like reading room complete with study carrels that block out distractions. And, of course, there are conference rooms of all sizes, phone booths, and desks aplenty.
“It’s about giving as much optionality to folks as possible,” says Sean Devlin, Duolingo’s VP of workplace and real estate, about the array of spaces available. “We want to allow them to do the best work of their lives. What do you need on a certain day to be effective? It’s different on different days.”
A neurodiverse office
From Duolingo’s perspective, an inclusive workspace starts with accommodating the neurodiversity of its employees. So the company collaborated with Rapt Studio to create an office that centers sensory experience.
Today there’s a growing recognition that architecture should accommodate the neurodiversity within our population. It’s a particular concern for offices, considering how much of our time we spend in them. Gone are the adult playgrounds (remember Google’s obsession with slides or GitHub’s faux Oval Office?) of the aughts and 2010s; in their place are designs informed by research in cognitive neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, and environmental psychology. It turns out that people don’t want a gimmick; they want a place that truly supports their well-being at work.
“Leading up to, and certainly coming out of the pandemic, it started to become really important to acknowledge that an office is not one size fits all,” says David Galullo, chief creative officer of Rapt Studio. “Two people may be doing the same function but need completely different environments to really bring out their best selves.”
What distinguishes the myriad spaces available to workers in Duolingo’s office is their atmosphere. They range from extremely quiet (like the aforementioned library) to highly energetic, like the cafeteria, which resembles a midcentury diner thanks to its big booths and glass-brick walls. There are conference rooms that are meant for a three- or four-person meeting with colleagues in remote offices, and larger lounge-like rooms that are comfortable for an hours-long in-person brainstorm. You can find a dimly lit nook in a less-trafficked hallway and desks bathed in natural light.
A new way to work
Part of making the office comfortable was making it easy to navigate, too. Some of the wayfinding devices like alphabetized conference room names and different paint colors for the different quadrants in the building help to better orient the 200-plus people who are based in the office.
“It’s not just designing space, but designing around rituals for individuals,” Galullo says. “We’re thinking about how people plug into work in different ways. It’s a much more interesting conversation than how many ping-pong tables you put in this space.”
Attracting talented employees was an important reason why Duolingo shaped its workspaces through the lens of neurodiversity. For starters, leading universities that tech companies tend to recruit from—like UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon—have already been doing this on their campuses. Devlin believes it’s important to keep ahead of that trend.
“The next wave of recruited talent is used to those spaces in a college environment,” he says. “If we don’t provide that optionality, why would they join our company? They’re going to go somewhere that provides that diversity of space.”
Still, the office is a calling card for the brand and so there are subtle surprises throughout the workspace that tell the story of Duolingo. The artwork in the gallery is one place where that happens; eventually the paintings will be interactive, allowing workers and visitors to have a conversation with the characters depicted. Meanwhile, Duo the owl has a habit of showing up in places where you least expect him—like a sculpture of him crashing through a wall in the dining area or intently typing on a laptop in the café—offering moments of levity and delight. In a room Devlin has dubbed “The Stacks,” there are shelves stocked with Duolingo merchandise, company awards, and employee resource group and club materials.
“We always say the workplace has to support the individual, it has to support the team, and it has to support the organization as a whole,” Galullo says.