Shawn Kemp

Shawn Kemp is a fourth-generation entrepreneur, industrial designer, and generative artist based in Bellingham, Washington. His career spans 25 years in technology, from Creative Director at Xbox to co-founding ActionSprout, a nonprofit social media platform used by 150,000 organizations in 70+ countries. He is currently Information Systems Renewal Officer at Non-GMO Project, where he leads regenerative systems strategy and the organization’s thoughtful adoption of AI tools.

Outside of work, Shawn creates Singulars: one-of-a-kind generative artworks fabricated as dimensional relief sculptures from layers of laser-cut paper. Each piece begins as a conversation with a collector, translated through algorithmic code and assembled by hand.

Shawn Kemp grew up in Kona, Hawaii, where he helped engineer the first solar vehicle to drive from California to Delaware as part of a state-sponsored high school competition. A chance encounter with industrial designer and IDSA co-founder Budd Steinhilber led him north to Western Washington University, where he earned a degree in Industrial Design in 1998. After graduating, he moved south to the Seattle area, where he’d spend the next eight years living in Seattle, Bellevue, and Redmond while working at Microsoft. He returned to Bellingham in 2006 and has been based there ever since. That commitment to one community has shaped everything that followed.

Shawn arrived at Microsoft in 2000 through a referral at a temp agency, where someone asked if he’d heard of a project called “codename Xbox.” Over the next six years, he served as Creative Director and Group Manager, leading the user experience and design for Xbox.com and Microsoft.com through three full site redesigns, building what was then described as a “robust and active community” around a new gaming console. By 2006, he was exhausted. Eighty-hour weeks, ethical unease about what the platform was optimizing for. He left.

The years that followed were a search for work that mattered. He consulted with ONE/Northwest (now Groundwire), building technology infrastructure for nonprofits. He founded ShareZen, a SaaS platform for shared-asset management that was profitably acquired in 2014. He launched The Big Idea Lab, a coworking space and startup accelerator in Bellingham. And in 2012, he co-founded ActionSprout with Drew Bernard and George DeCarlo to help nonprofits and civic organizations use Facebook effectively.

ActionSprout grew to 150,000 clients across 70+ countries, bootstrapped for years before taking angel funding from Oregon Angel Fund, Bellingham Angel Fund, and Portland Seed Fund. It was the longest and most impactful venture of Shawn’s career. It was also the one that most directly confronted him with the dual nature of the tools he’d helped build. The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 crystallized what he had been sensing: the same platform architecture that helped nonprofits organize donors could be weaponized to divide voters. In May 2021, after nine years, he stepped away. “Physically exhausted, mentally exhausted, and ethically exhausted.”

During the pandemic, Shawn had quietly begun exploring generative art. What started as a creative outlet on the fxhash platform became a full practice: writing algorithms that produce infinite visual variations, then selecting the resonant ones and fabricating them as dimensional layered sculptures using a 100W CO₂ laser cutter and archival bookbinding techniques. In 2023, he formalized this into the Singulars model: one-of-a-kind commissions that begin when a collector shares a story, emotion, or memory, which Shawn translates into algorithmic parameters and physical form.

Today, Shawn serves as Information Systems Renewal Officer at Non-GMO Project, where he’s trying to show that information systems work itself can be regenerative rather than extractive. He leads the organization’s AI adoption strategy. He’s not racing to roll out tools for efficiency gains; he’s helping the team figure out which capabilities actually align with the Project’s values, and how to keep human judgment in the loop as more of the work gets automated.

The pivots aren’t really the story. The story is one question, coming back at different volumes: what does it mean to build technology well? The answer keeps getting smaller and slower. More craft. More community. Less scale.