Who we are
Sean is a former Director of Business Development at PickNik Robotics, where he grew the company's space robotics practice. Before robotics he worked in early-stage hardware and data science development at 3Scan, a biotechnology startup.
Closer to the water, he co-founded Astraeus Ocean Systems, which builds monitoring tools for coastal ecosystems, and wrote grants for REAP Climate Center, which trains a workforce on regenerative farms. Island Lab is the continuation of local communities working in alignment with their ecosystems; Sean put technical capacity in the hands of the people closest to the system.
Community building · strategy · political science & economics · hardware, software & data science
Kate is a former Executive Design Director at IDEO and IDEO.org, where she led client relationships and the design teams behind them. Her work there ran from design research through shipped software: interaction design, systems, and strategy for organizations in health, automotive, farming, and education.
She brings that discipline to rooms as well as screens. For Island Lab she designs the gatherings themselves: the shape of the days, the questions worth asking, and the conditions under which new thinking becomes possible.
Emerging technology · software, interaction & game design · systems design · visual arts · writing
For as long as we've been sailors, we've gathered people on the water. It's where we grow, and where we see most clearly. Together we skipper Petrichor, our Catalina 36, throughout the Salish Sea in the summers. We are Race to Alaska 2024 alumni.
Islands have always drawn us in. They're the places most accessible from a sailor's perspective, and yet among the least advocated for. Sailing from Mexico to Alaska and beyond, we keep finding the same situation: communities making hard tradeoffs between resource extraction and livelihoods, caught between forces that aren't aligned with their long-term interests.
Activists care deeply but often spend their energy advocating against something, rather than building towards an alternative future. Industry isn't inherently bad, but is structured around profit and scale rather than long-term investment in a place. Scientists do rigorous work, but academic timelines keep findings from making a difference when decisions are being made. Local governments and community members: the actual long-term stewards: are well-positioned but under-resourced, pressured by industry, and without the tools to act clearly under that pressure.
We started seeing what we could bring: our backgrounds in Silicon Valley, working on human-centered design and technology problems across industries: health, automotive, farming, space, robotics, and education: and the kind of field instincts you develop making decisions in difficult environments, with incomplete information and real consequences.
All of it points toward one question: how might we strengthen the systems that protect the commons?
Island Lab is how we're finding out.
