Join WILD at the San Francisco Design Week Hub at Pier 27 and meet throughout the day on June 8th from 8:30 am to 5 pm with other women in the design community. Join us in the morning for coffee from Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, a fireside chat with Alessandra Wood, Director of Style at Modsy, and San Francisco Design Week artist, Chloe Bensahel. The day will conclude with a happy hour featuring wine from Nasty Women Wines.
About WILD
AIGA SF’s Women in Leadership and Design (WILD) initiative aims for gender parity in design. The purpose of WILD Programming, meetups and workshops is to empower women and genderqueer persons at every stage on their path to leadership.
We welcome all design and creative disciplines or those who work with creatives or on design teams.
Everyone is welcome to attend WILD events, however, please take measure of your own privilege and give space to those from traditionally marginalized populations.
Schedule
The WILD Lounge will be open on June 8th from 8:30 am until 5 pm
8:30 – 10:00 am: Coffee
10:00 – 10:30 am: Fireside Chat with Alessandra Wood
3:00 – 3:30 pm Fireside chat with Chloe Bensahel
3:30 – 5 pm: Happy Hour
One ticket allows admittance to the lounge throughout the day on June 8th from 8:30 am to 5 pm, and you are welcome to come and go as you please. The price of the ticket covers the cost of beverages and allows us to cover the cost of the venue and furniture rental.
Interested in spending the day at the lounge but worried about last-minute meetings or deadlines? The WILD Lounge is equipped with WiFi and the Design Hub will have multiple Zenbooths throughout the Pier. Dovetail X will also be hosting a mini co-working space where you can reserve a desk slot in advance (for free)!
It is our goal to make programming accessible to everyone. If you are unable to afford the price of a ticket, please email harper@sfdesignweek.org with the subject line “WILD Lounge Ticket.” Include in your email a brief note about why you qualify, and what you can afford to pay. We have a limited number of full scholarships available.
speakers
Alessandra Wood, Director of Style, Modsy
Alessandra Wood has always been driven by the incredible possibilities of fusing design and technology. Joining in 2015 as its first employee, Alessandra is the Director of Style at Modsy where she is responsible for helping to bring the intersection of interior design and 3D technology to life. Prior to Modsy, she worked at two other interior design disruptors, including Y Combinator company Tastemaker. With a PhD in Design History and an M.A. in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, she has intense academic training in the style, production, and consumption of furniture and interiors—a bona fide design expert, trained by world class curators and historians. At Modsy, she is obsessed with applying that knowledge to understand what makes products beautiful/useful/successful and what inspires people to love and purchase those products. In addition to her work at Modsy, Alessandra is a firm believer in the importance of learning and is a professor of design history and theory at the University of San Francisco.
Chloe Bensahel, Artist
Chloe Bensahel blends traditional craft and multimedia to create large-scale installations highlighting immigrant narratives from past and present. Born into a Jewish-Moroccan family in France and later a French immigrant in the U.S., Bensahel’s work is inseparable from her own cultural narrative. Impacted by her own experience of being culturally mixed, Bensahel observes the historical and contextual stories linked to materials, and builds them into layers of meaning, with every stitch and thread acting as text. Trained in textiles at Parsons the New School for Design, Bensahel has also worked for artists Sheila Hicks and Jun Tomita, and was recently awarded a residency at the Australian Tapestry Workshop in Melbourne.
In this fireside chat, Chloe will discuss the role of origin stories both historically and in contemporary society, with examples of instances where origin stories have paved the way for change. Women have often been the gatekeepers of family narratives in various traditions, from the sewing circle to initiation ceremonies. Today, however, the way we understand ourselves and others has morphed into an act of design, in collaboration with the communities we choose and the new homes we create for ourselves. As more women move out of the home and into the workplace, a new and decentralized approach to origin stories is at play in an era marked by migration and information.
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