Offcourse Studio

Make Technology Work for You

From a personalized learning coach to a network of virtual assistants, technology can help you focus on critical challenges rather than waste energy on uninspiring tasks. Think about it. What could you achieve if you have creative AI to support you?

Offcourse Studio works with you to develop technology that works for you.

Bots with an attitude is a project for Planet B from Waag. Planet B is a mission to recolonise planet Earth based on a narrative of DIY expeditions to a fictional planet. The project ‘Bots with an attitude’ is a support system for artistic researchers, who work or wish to work with machine learning and AI. The bots are personal assistants. They help by gathering information or helping publish the artist's work. However, they are unusual bots, because they have a character and mind of their own, leading to unexpected encounters and, hopefully, productive surprises.

Bots With An Attitude

1Map

We inventory the data and knowledge that you use. What processes are already in place? What challenges do you encounter? For example, knowledge may only be transferred informally, or not at all. We visualize the knowledge ecosystem of your practice to provide insight in the processes that are critical to you.

2Strategize

We create a plan to clean up, connect and aggregate your data and design data models specific to your practice. What data do you need when and where? How do you want your data delivered? And which tools and services do you need? We develop a roadmap to identify the steps to take to strengthen your knowledge infrastructure.

3Intervene

We develop an infrastructure of tools and services that transform your work. This may be a bot that organizes a personalized festival program, a system that validates the ethical values of online products, or a beacon that transforms your exhibition into an educational game. We embed these tools and services into your practice. We take the time to test and document the resulting ecosystem until it works for you.

The multidimensional universe of the digital

Jan Hein Hoogstad is the founder of Offcourse Studio. He’s fascinated by the unlimited possibilities we create in the digital world. He sees the digital as an extra dimension that we add to the ‘real world’, as a way to add multiple tracks to our reality. He embraces its creative potential, and the possibility to visualise multiple outcomes based on different sets of slightly altered parameters.

Creative approach to projects and solutions

'Think'.gsub(/[.ink]/, tinkerer[2..-1]) => thinkerer. Or for non-coders: Jan Hein is an educator and self-taught software architect with a demonstrated track record of working with various private and public partners – University of Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Waag, Public Spaces, Bocoup, UncInc – to create online and offline spaces using digital technologies, ranging from software solutions, such as artifical intelligence, and hardware solutions, such as beacons.

Diverse domains and international background

Jan Hein holds a PhD in Philosophy and Media Studies. He was an assistant professor of Cultural Analysis, and a coach and teacher at DevBootcamp in San Francisco. He’s embedded in an international network of researchers, developers, designers, and artists. Previously he was based in Berlin, San Francisco, Taipei, Minneapolis, New York, Wenen, Graz, Istanbul, Ghent, Utrecht, and Amsterdam. Currently, he works from Rotterdam The Netherlands.

Creative

Ethical

Intelligence