Hi, welcome 👋
I'm Joost MF Liebregts, a designer, maker and inventor at the intersection of people, design and technology. I believe we're at our best when we decide things together.
What I keep coming back to is this: real change only holds when the people it's for own it. So I build new systems that surface the wisdom already in a group, prototyping together with the people it's for, with conversations, session formats and tools. AI is one of the newest materials I work with. I facilitate, I coach, I build. I share that practice openly in the Social AI Field Guide.
🔍 More about my journey
I trained as an Industrial Designer at Eindhoven University of Technology, where I learned to see systems, ask better questions, and design with people rather than for them.
That foundation led me to facilitation and coaching. I started by helping design students find their voice, and discovered that what really drew me was designing the conditions where people grow, more than the products themselves. I facilitated bottom-up processes for municipalities, helped political organizations align across borders, and kept asking the same question: how do we create spaces where people feel safe enough to truly collaborate?
Then, in 2023, I was walking through a forest in Drenthe, talking to an AI about my work, my doubts, what I was trying to build. After an hour of conversation, it asked: "What would you say to your younger self?"
I found it genuinely strange that technology could do this. That it could follow a conversation closely enough to ask something that landed.
That sparked a question I'm still exploring: if it can do this for me, what could it mean for the groups I work with? For capturing what people actually mean? For helping communities see patterns they're too close to notice?
Now I explore those questions in practice: AI as a partner in human cooperation. Same mission. New territory.
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