DECIDE AUSTIN

The developers and employees at Decide (formerly “Lockerdome”) work hard and play hard, and their corporate culture demands a wide variety of heads-down and collaborative options in the workplace. While Decide draws talent from all over the world and allows remote work from anywhere, they tasked Arcturis to design their new Austin, Texas location to be a hub of energy and creativity.

Decide is an advertising technology company that uses machine learning and data to help advertisers and publishers determine when to place advertisements. Decide began as a start up in St Louis, MO called Lockerdome, a sports-focused social media platform. The company’s patented artificial intelligence programs fostered rapid development of machine learning and brought a recent rebranding and renaming of the company. With its expansion came the opening of an office in Austin, Texas.

True to form, Decide chose a location for their Austin office that was as unique and energizing as their company: a small free-standing 2-story building in the heart of Austin’s Entertainment District. On the 2nd floor, developers work nearly shoulder-to-shoulder in quiet dimly lit and highly focused agile workspace. In contrast, the ground floor is imbedded in the street-level experience of Austin’s 6th Street’s alternative vibe, quirky bars, coffee shops, dancing, dining and food trucks. An exterior 2-story graffiti-style mural allows Decide’s space to blend right in to the East Austin culture, and inside the building, the vibrant mural is reimagined on a smaller scale as a 25x15 ft full height full-width interior wall mural.

Acting as an innovation hub, the 1st floor boasts an island for gathering, a unique custom back bar display inspired by Decide’s new brand imagery, and a massive video wall. A mix of soft seating, barstools, and movable meeting tables offer many ways to collaborate or socialize, whether conferencing internally, gathering for an All Hands meeting, entertaining clients, or hosting a reception to welcome new talent.

Exposed floors and ceilings contrast intricate detailing for key items like the back bar, the huge custom mural, or the window drink rail where employees can take in the sights and sounds at street level, either with a laptop or with a beer. The play of raw of materials and basic abstract shapes that mimic Decide’s logo and branding elements play out the concept of simple and practical elements that translate into complex ideas --- just like their trademark AI technology.