Women In Design evening is comprising 2 events at Dancing Goats, Ponce City Market.
6-7pm: Designing a New Essential Service – Building and Leading Instacart’s Design Team in Unprecedented Times
When the first stay-at-home order was enacted in the US in March 2020, many companies had to pivot to remote work and try to absorb the changes that involved. At Instacart, it was more than moving meetings to Zoom–we had to quickly adapt to becoming an essential service. Instacart immediately stepped up to support millions of customers across the US and Canada and ramped up to half a million shoppers so that people across North America could safely access groceries and essentials and shoppers could access a safe and flexible income stream.
Overnight, Instacart’s mission of creating a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together became even more visceral.To successfully meet the needs of customers, shoppers, retailers, and advertisers, Instacart had to immediately scale its Design team in a big way: more than doubling the team in less than a year while adapting to the challenges of working remotely. We had to hire quickly and set up brand new functions like content design, but we couldn’t afford to trade hiring speed for design quality.
In her ADF talk, Whitney Homans, Director of Content Design, shares lessons the Instacart team learned about hiring, managing, and leading high performing design teams during unprecedented times. She’ll walk you through designing in a crisis and creating an environment and culture that attracts and invigorates top design talent–all while working faster and on more complex problems than ever before, from makeshift home offices and crowded kitchen tables.
7-8pm: Production Design with Major Art Department’s Hannah Meachin
Hannah will share every aspect of building her career as a young female production designer, including the unique creative process she goes through when developing sets and how that process differs depending on content, client, and budget.
She will also talk about what inspired her to start Major Art Department, a set design and prop fabrication company run and operated primarily by women. With clients ranging from Usher to Food Network to Mercedes Benz to Elton John, DJ Khaled, Missy Elliot, and more, her experience covers a wide range of types of design and conceptualization.
Meachin will tell real stories about her experiences in the entertainment industry that range from hiking props through the rainforests of Jamaica to wrangling dozens of hissing cockroaches on an overnight shoot with a top billboard artist.