Conversations with Sara Sosnowski

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Sosnowski.

Hi Sara, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I grew up surrounded by different art forms through my family members. My mother, Martha, who is of Guatemalan origin, had an import-export business painting crafts. My father, Max, born in America, is a musician and my uncle John is a renowned artist in New York. Being born in El Salvador and growing up in Guatemala, I was surrounded by artists’ friends with very unique and free-spirited personalities.

When each person’s unique contribution is encouraged and celebrated, your family’s identity becomes a mutual work of art that is one of its kind. I was also influenced by tech from my uncle Ed who visited us with his newest released software from Microsoft and I enjoyed creating my own calendars and agendas instead of buying them. I remember once a teacher liked my own calendar created in Publisher and asked me to make him one. Little did I know I was going to do something similar for many years to come!

I started working with the first Internet Provider back in 1996 in my home country, Guatemala, installing modems and routers, I moved to the web design department and learned HTML on Saturdays with some friends from work. I also gave demos of “what is an email and the Internet” to large clients across Central America. I needed to get back to school so I couldn’t work there anymore so I got an offer to work part-time for a learning platform filtering internet for schools. The owners of the company, Hipernet, happened to be Deans of the Faculty of Systems Engineering in the most prestigious University in the country (Former UFM-FISSIC now Galileo University).

I got offered a scholarship to continue my education. I looked at the different programs they offered and I couldn’t find one that I wanted to take as there was nothing that would teach me what I wanted to learn which was more modern than learning PASCAL. I helped them to start a program for continuing education at the university so professionals could get updated with the newest technology, international teachers came to give the Post Degree in Networking we started. I remember learning the binary number system and understanding the speed of data traveling through a dial-up modem of 56Kbits.

Later on, I got an offer to work for the presidency in my home country creating a digital library of historic sites across the country. It was fun to do photography and interview mayors of different towns and get thank you gifts such as purple onions and chickens. Even though I was enjoying my life and work in Guatemala, I always dreamed of following my grandmother’s steps and coming to the United States.

I moved to the US when I was 21 and joined The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. After getting my degree I got tons of job offers, as I won the best portfolio Award from my class. I worked for MovieTickets.com where we collaborated closely with studios such as Sony, Warner Bros, Lucas Films, and others which I got feedback for my work. I learned there the importance of detail in my work. I worked for a Fortune 500 company, CBS Interactive and I also had independent clients: Black and Decker, Hasbro, Westin Hotels, and others.

After being in the US for 8 years, I was ready to go back to Guatemala. I was having a successful career but I was depressed and homesick. I went back for 2 years and on one of my trips back to Florida I met my husband Brad in a yoga class. We got married in 2008 and now we have a beautiful 11-year-old, Elijah. Brad is originally from Colorado but grew up in Raleigh, NC. So he told me I was going to love it here. People are nice and kind, we are in the middle of the mountains and ocean so as it reminded me of where I grew up, I trusted him and now we’ve been in this area for 9 years and is the place I now call home.

Deep down, I am passionate about making art and yoga. Art gives meaning to our lives and helps us understand our world. It is an essential part of our culture because it allows us to have a deeper understanding of our emotions; it increases our self-awareness, and also allows us to be open to new ideas and experiences. With my son Elijah and my husband Brad, we spend a lot of free time playing music, drawing, and doing crafts. One of the legacies that one day I would like to transmit to him is that you can be anything you want, follow that little voice that is inside of you and guides you.

Many people along the way will try to convince you that you can’t do this or that, but I’d like to prove them wrong. I once thought I wouldn’t make it in the US, or that I was going to be a starving artist if I chose to go to Art School, but after 20 years, it has been a pretty great career for me.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’ve had great moments but also very difficult ones. One of them is that people will tell you something is too hard, or you won’t be able to do it. If you believe that, you can get discouraged along the way and you will not go far. I like to challenge these people and prove them wrong.

It can also be lonely sometimes, being in a new place, a new culture, different people. different language. It took me a long time to adapt and maybe I am still adapting or I won’t ever fully adapt to one place. I am not the person who left Guatemala at 21, I’ve grown and changed, I’ve learned and experienced so many different things and expanded my mind. I am now bio-cultural and I guess that’s just who I am, I have the Latin American culture embedded in me and also the American culture. I see the pros and cons in both and I try to keep what is valuable from each one. For instance, family values in Latin culture are very strong, and work ethics in American culture are great. Keeping the balance is definitely challenging!

I guess comparing myself to other artists has been a quirk of mine. I know my work is good because I’ve heard it many times from different people but deep down I’m always thinking it could be better. The perfectionist in me kicks in and is hard to praise my own work. When I compare what I’ve done in the past to what I do now I see how much I’ve improved, It’s a healthier approach to see it that way.

With yoga practice and daily meditation, I am constantly challenging my own ideas and beliefs. I like to see myself as someone who can change and see different perspectives. I believe we are a reflection of our own beliefs and if we don’t like what we see or what we are experiencing I question what is inside of me that I am attracting this situation? What can I learn from this? What is life trying to teach me? How can I change it? We can always change the way we see things and once we change our perspective, things around us start changing too.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
With the influence of a mix of art and tech in my family, I became a UI UX Designer.

To me, as designers, we are problem solvers and I truly believe we are responsible to make the world a better place. What we do matters as we are designing what people see on television, on billboards, we create the products people have in their homes, their children’s environment maybe their toys. Also, we create what people see on the internet. Imagine you are an urban architect, and your job is not only to design a house and a building but to design the journey for people to go from their home to their place of work. The experience people have gone from place A to place B matters as they will have certain opportunities along the way. They might be happier, more joyful, and better people if is a positive experience.

On the other hand, it is a negative one, then they can become maybe angry, feel anxiety, maybe they’ll be sad or even get depressed. Designing online is very similar, we have the responsibility to design great experiences for our users. We hold this power and if we are aware of it we can use it well we can influence people to be better, less annoyed, less confused, more joyful, provide them with more exciting, magical moments. Therefore the world will be a better place. Using design thinking methodologies and processes we can achieve that.

I’ve been a designer for more than 20 years. Throughout this time I’ve done graphic design, web design, product design, interactive design, and UI UX design. I stayed home for 3 years after my son was born as I didn’t want to go back to an office and leave my son in daycare. Maybe because I was in a new place and I didn’t know that many people and I felt I had to protect him.

I was so lucky to be called by an agent and I got a job offer to work from anywhere, revolutionizing the future of education using tools in a virtual office. It was a great job to be close to my son. For the last 7 years, I’ve worked remotely for Cisco Systems. One of them specially transformed the way I wanted to work forever. I took a Crash Course of Design Thinking, the gift-giving experience from Stanford University.

It expanded my perception of what human-centered design really meant and how to apply it in my own life and the things I do on a daily basis. I was creating just to create but I wanted to create with meaning and understanding with empathy to who I was designing for. It tilted in my understanding the scale on what is product focus vs human focus. It was eye-opening and from that moment I knew I had to do something to change and work this new way.

I studied, read books, and learned as much as I could about design thinking then I found out the company was looking to train internal facilitators. I talked to my managers and they fully supported me and they sent a letter of recommendation to the design thinking team. I was one of the first 22 design thinkers at Cisco and we all met in NYC to launch the first pilot program. What was interesting is that I was one of the only designers in the room. We had product owners, product managers, sales specialists, business analysts, even engineering department leads. It was so exciting for me to be in a room full of like-minded people across the world with cross-disciplinary collaboration.

In Raleigh, I’ve been involved in the local designer’s community events such as the AIGA local chapter and Creative Mornings but there wasn’t one for Design Thinking. So I started one called Design Thinkers of RTP. My husband Brad and my son Elijah were my biggest supporters as they came with me to my first 10-15 meetings. I was super nervous, we found a great co-working space, we bought some food and drinks, I brought tons of sticky notes, pens, and dot voting stickers and we launched our first meetup. 7 people showed up. Then we had about 15, then 30… we met people from IBM, Duke Innovation, Students from Chapel Hill, NC State. We moved to a bigger space and our community was active and thriving. Then COVID happened!

Silicon Valley Design Thinking Club.   We had amazing local and international speakers, such as Jonathan Opp from New Kind, Robert Skrobe from Global Virtual Design Sprints in Dallas, TX. Dan Levy from More Space for Light in Australia, Daniel Herrera from Mexico, Stefania Leventure from Germany.  Our up and upcoming events are with Benjamin Shown from Seattle, Rob Leonard from  Mathscaper in Seattle and Minou Schillings from the Netherlands.

This community has taught me so many things. One is that people are willing to collaborate and people are looking for community, I heard stories of people walking this path alone, they get very excited when they find it. I realized that as humans, we have similar challenges, similar needs and we all strive for human connection and understanding. Also, I had a hang-up with my accent because I am a native Spanish speaker, so I asked myself why would people listen to me? Now I truly know that it was all in my head.

In 2020, I participated with a team inside Cisco in the first Virtual Automation Bootcamp for Cisco LIVE which was a design thinking workshop for engineers. I’ve run multiple design sprints with international clients, I was part of Retail X Masterclass with Visual Merchandiser Pedro Brolo which I am truly thankful for as some of the other participants were up there with the CEO of ZARA and it was backed up by the British Visual Merchandising Association. Also, I was kindly invited to give a workshop to Pakistani Women in Computing  and TEC Guatemala which is the largest technology ecosystem in Central America.

I am now committed to transmitting the information and knowledge I have to the ones coming after me. I want to leave this world a better place than I found it by empowering designers to teach them how to fish and become creative thinkers.

What sets me apart from others?

Community builder is not something I see all the time. So that’s one thing that sets me apart. As a designer, there are many areas you can specialize in. I have a rounded set of skills that vary from UX Research, Visual Design, UX Design, Sketching, Illustrations, Brand development, and facilitation skills to running a full design sprint or mini design thinking workshops.

What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I love this quote: “Every weakness contains within itself a strength.”

I am curious and I like to learn new things. Besides being a learner for life, I am also very stubborn. When I was younger if wanted a pair of shoes my mom wouldn’t buy them, I worked one whole month next to the shoe store, the day I got paid I had enough money to buy my shoes and I would get them.

I also remember I wasn’t a very good dancer and I wanted to play a part in a performance at my local dance studio. I practiced for 8 months and I finally got selected to play the part of only 3 dancers. I work really hard for what I want to achieve, I find different ways until I get there. So this stubbornness I now call it perseverance, as is, has taken me far.

Contact Info:

• Email: saraesosnowski@gmail.com
• Website: https://sarauiux.com/
• Instagram:@sara.ui.ux and @iamsaraeloise
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sara.uiux
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/saraesos
• Other: https://designthinkersrtp.com/

Image Credits
Headshot photographed by Audrey De Gámez audreyprofilestudio.com