Sean McDonald / Colorbox
When did you attend HATCH?
I attended my first HATCH in 2006. I have attended 8 more since then.
What was a highlight?
I’ve fallen in love with so many things at HATCH – ideas, art, people – that it’s hard to choose one. One that stands out is that a group of HATCHers, with support from Intel, attended C2 in Montreal. The event itself was incroyable if you know what I mean, with Cirque du Soleil performing and the magic of Montreal. There was a huge open space, full of small seating and snacks, art and micro-performance, and there you could see hundreds of attendees at any given time; but you always knew who the HATCHers were. They were engaging, warm, aspirational and, for many people, myself included, inspirational. So this “tribe within a tribe” really spoke to the supportive network – the community – of HATCH. The most interesting people I met at C2 were people to whom I was introduced by fellow HATCHers and, well, like I said: I fell in love a lot there.
Tell us your #becauseofHATCH story
Well I have a few. Each year.
The project I’d like to share on this pass is The COLORBOX Project. The project started as a wild idea between a few HATCHers: Royce Gorsuch, former HATCH groundbreaker, and Elysa Fenenbock, who is Designer in Residence at Google and myself. (We later recruited Dick Whitney from Spark.io…also a HATCHer.) The project grew to capture over 3,000 portraits and our artwork is featured in Univision Headquarters lobby in Manhattan. We’ve worked with Coca-Cola, Stanford’s d.school and other leading brands, and we were featured at Art Basel 2013 in Miami. All #becauseofHATCH.
The thing that COLORBOX does so successfully is very HATCHy. The project unlocks people’s creativity and snaps a portrait of them in that moment.
When people participate in the shoot, they are not models, actors, or trained. They jump right into the idea. (Which you can see in detail at our website.) And when they do that, they embrace their inner creative self. The idea is that the right kind of rules foster, not stifle, creativity and make people feel more comfortable showing a camera that beautiful, wonderful, playful self inside them. So COLORBOX is kind of like a piece of gym equipment, but instead of exercising your body, it exercises your creativity.
I think HATCH helped make COLORBOX happen in three ways:
1) Connecting like-minded creatives together in a comfortable, supportive culture
2) Encouraging HATCH community members to activate creativity in their work and lives – and side-projects
3) Making critical introductions that led to opportunities, and hosting COLORBOX at HATCH 2012 (Thanks Yarrow!)
Also: shameless plug. The COLORBOX Project needs to connect with a data-driven market research company, so please email or facebook message us if you know any potentially interested people.
What’s next?
I’m part of a small startup team at Bitwater Farms. We’re developing agricultural technologies and equipment for the future of farming. We focus on developing ultra-low-water crops that are high in protein and use less than 1% of the water plants use to create the same amount of protein. We retrofit farms to grow crickets, which are fed to poultry. The company is three months old and doing great in sales and partnerships; and every pound of cricket fed to poultry instead of soy frees up 250 gallons of water to be used for other purposes. This is especially important because of the drought in CA.
