Cowork

Inspiration

Remote work promised freedom, but delivered something unexpected: silence. No hallway conversations, no spontaneous coffee runs, no feeling that your teammates are there. Studies show that over 68% of remote workers report feeling isolated, and that loneliness doesn't just hurt morale but actually compounds over time into burnout and disengagement. We spent the first phase reading -- Reddit threads, academic studies, burnout statistics...

What we found was that the most telling moments were not the complaints about eye strain or back pain. They were the small collapses of self-narrative: people who said they had "never found their rhythm," who described their compulsion to keep working as "like an illness," who framed their exhaustion as laziness before a therapist reframed it as burnout. People who had given up on the idea that remote work could feel like anything other than endurance.

We wanted to answer a simple question: what if remote work felt more like a place than a task? We drew inspiration from games like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley which are spaces where people naturally gather, exist together, and take breaks without feeling forced while also being nostalgic for a lot of the current workers in the industry. We also looked at how coworking cafés create ambient social energy just by putting people in the same room. Cowork is our attempt to bring that feeling into the browser.

What it Does

Cowork is a virtual coworking space designed to make remote work feel human again. You start with a quick onboarding flow where you pick your avatar, set your interests, and choose how long you usually take breaks so the space feels personal from the moment you arrive. From there, you join a shared coworking room where you can see your teammates working alongside you in real time. When you need a recharge, you head to the Social Break Space, where you can lounge, play board games, or browse the library and chat with coworkers who are taking a break at the same time. Breaks are entirely on your terms, whether that's a quick reset, a walk, or a full social session. To keep people coming back, we built in a return loop — a light gamification system that rewards you for taking regular breaks, so stepping away from your desk actually feels worth it. Cowork turns the loneliest part of remote work into the best part of your day.

How we built it

Cowork is a mid-fidelity interactive prototype designed and built entirely in Figma. The product spans 7 interconnected screens: Onboarding flow (4 steps: welcome → avatar → interests → break duration) Coworking Space (main work view with ambient peer presence) Social Break Space (full chat, collapsed, profile, and messaging states) Characters were built as layered geometric primitives with heads, torsos, limbs and with department indicators rendered as glassy Animal Crossing-style bubbles. The board game table is a fully reusable Figma component with 13 grouped sub-elements (table, game board, card stacks, tokens, dice, etc.). We also built a custom Y2K-style terminal chat box in the bottom-left corner of the break space, styled after retro game UIs with scanline overlays and color-coded department names.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest problem was making the space feel alive without being distracting. Too much movement or social pressure and it becomes too overwhelming. Too little and it felt like a wallpaper. Finding that balance drove most of our design decisions.

On the technical side, building characters with organic layouts (facing each other, offset rooms, non-grid furniture) required careful layering and a lot of attention to detail. We also wrestled with the social break paradox: the people who most need a break are least likely to take one. Our solution was making the break feel like a destination rather than just stepping away from the screen.

Built With

• figma