Offcourse Studio

Offcourse Studio is a creative technology practice founded by Jan Hein Hoogstad (Yeehaa), combining expertise in philosophy, media studies, software architecture, and international experience. The studio emerged from years of work in education technology and ecosystem design, including the founding of Offcourse—an open source learning platform that reimagined education outside institutional walls. Drawing on this foundation, Offcourse Studio now works with organizations to design intelligent systems that treat technology as a creative partner rather than a replacement for human effort. The practice operates at the intersection of technology, culture, and organizational design, guided by the conviction that we need structures that work more like living systems than machines.

Organizations struggle with fragmented knowledge ecosystems, disconnected tools, and technology that constrains rather than enables their work. Traditional approaches treat technology as either a replacement for human effort or as a one-size-fits-all solution, missing opportunities to create systems that genuinely serve organizational needs. The deeper challenge is that most organizations lack the frameworks to understand their own knowledge infrastructure—how information flows, where bottlenecks exist, and what tools could meaningfully improve their practice. Without this clarity, technology implementations often create more problems than they solve.

Offcourse Studio employs a three-phase methodology grounded in understanding before building. First, they map existing data and knowledge ecosystems—conducting deep analysis of how organizations actually work, where knowledge gets stuck, and what friction points exist. Second, they strategize infrastructure improvements by identifying where thoughtful intervention could have the most impact. Third, they intervene with custom tools designed specifically for the organization's context and values. These interventions take forms like personalized AI assistants for artistic researchers (as in "Bots with an Attitude") and ethical values certification systems for internet products (as in "Public Badges"). The approach is grounded in principles from Value Driven Development and ecosystem architecture—making values explicit, designing for regeneration rather than extraction, and treating technology as infrastructure that enables human creativity rather than replacing it. Rather than deploying off-the-shelf solutions, Offcourse Studio builds bespoke systems that respect the organization's existing practices while creating new possibilities.

Through projects like "Bots with an Attitude" and "Public Badges," Offcourse Studio has demonstrated that custom-built tools can fundamentally change how organizations relate to technology. The work reveals that when technology is designed with genuine understanding of organizational context and values, it becomes a creative partner that frees people to focus on meaningful work rather than routine tasks. The studio's practice has validated a core insight: technology's value lies not in solving problems at scale, but in solving the right problems with precision and care. By treating knowledge infrastructure as a living system rather than a mechanical system to be optimized, Offcourse Studio helps organizations discover what becomes possible when tools align with values and culture.