About

Shawn spent six years at Microsoft, three of them as Creative Director for Xbox, leading the user experience and production art for Xbox.com, Shop.Microsoft.com, and Microsoft.com/insider. Before that, he earned a BS in industrial design from Western Washington University, in Bellingham, the town he has called home since 1994.

After Microsoft, he spent over a decade building things outside big tech: he did technology strategy work for nonprofits, founded a coworking space and startup accelerator in Bellingham, and co-founded ActionSprout, a company that helped nonprofits and political campaigns use Facebook effectively. He worked on it for nine years, in a strategic and product role.

He started making generative art in late 2020, and started cutting it into physical objects soon after. The laser-cut, hand-assembled paper sculptures he makes now are the current form of that practice.

Shawn writes the generative algorithms himself, then runs them to produce dozens of candidate images before choosing the one that clicks. That image is decomposed into a stack of vector layers, one per physical plane, and sent to a 100W CO₂ laser that cuts each layer from mat board with hair's-width precision.

From there it's hand work: stacking layers, applying archival PVA glue, and assembling the piece himself in his studio. He ships every physical piece directly to the collector who bought it.