absurd:joy is a collection of curious humans focused on bringing joy to remote communication.

We're developing Tangle! A collaboration tool that fosters the hearts and minds of creatives and teams! 

absurd:joy is prototyping remote culture as well as cool new tech so it’s worth talking about how we operate and what kind of studio we are. We are currently a small team of games industry and app development veterans. We’ve spent a lot of time in *weird new tech* so our brains are often geared around natural human interaction with technology. How people want to use technology and making sure we meet them there, and not making people contort themselves to the tech. (And hopefully delighting them in the process!)

And humans must include everyone. Accessibility and inclusion is intrinsic to our designs in order to provide an experience that is easy and joyful. 

So though our team is small, we include a wide range of humans, including various genders, sexualities, upbringings, and beliefs/creeds. We are, however, predominately ethnically homogeneous. This is part of a systemic problem within the technology industry, but also something that we are complicit in. Many of us have personally benefited from the system, though it quite tangibly makes our company and our products weaker. We fundamentally believe that easy joyful experiences that are truly built for everyone cannot be made without a team of diverse humans bringing their own unique experiences, backgrounds, lives, and energy to what we're making.

Internally, we take steps to work with external specialists to address our own biases. Externally, we share resources, information, and learnings freely and publicly to try and provide assistance to those who have less access to them due to the systemic and institutional discrimination that occurs in this industry. absurd:joy considers this work to be fundamental to the company, and provides resources to employees who take this on.  

It is important for us to communicate this to anyone who is considering working with us, because this philosophy of diversity and inclusion is something that is very important to our company, but is also an area in which we need to do work and make improvements.