Written by Kendall McKinnon, Photos by Kendra Frankle
SCAD’s writing department chose Laura Silva to be its alumni mentor for the 2019 academic year. Since graduating [B.F.A Writing, minor in Service Design 2016], Silva has found herself storytelling while immersed in the world of user experience design.
“I got my passion for writing because I learned how to write English before I learned how to speak it,” Silva said.
As an immigrant from Colombia, while learning the language she discovered a knack for conveying stories that directly correlated to her upbringing. “[Storytelling] is embedded in my culture. ‘Don’t put your purse on the ground, because then you won’t get married.’ That’s a story, a little fable, that gets shared throughout my culture all the time,” Silva said. She recognized the talent she possesses, understood the powerful role that stories play in people’s lives and wanted to use her own work for equally noble purposes.
Right out of the gate, Silva landed a job at Amazon as the Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility UX Design Lead for their search team. This position came after interning on the same team during her senior year at SCAD.
Now her current title is Vice President of Global Technology and Operations—Accessibility Technology UX Design Lead for Bank of America. What motivates her work is accessibility and inclusion despite differences or limitations. “You understand the human behind the sex, the color of the skin and the nationality. You understand the person behind disability in UX. That’s what empowers me, and that’s the work that I do,” Silva said.
Over the course of her time at SCAD, Silva took advantage of the Career Fair, exploring different writing avenues through four different internships. She tried blogging, content creation and social media, but none of them sparked passion. Silva discovered that she could not take a traditional writing job, yet she knew deep down that she had to tell stories. She was not discouraged.
“You will most likely always change your career, or your career will transform from one thing to the other. That’s natural. We evolve and our mentality evolves with us,” Silva said. “SCAD and our environment allows us to find out what we don’t like to do, and that matters.”
“I highlight the intersectionality of people,” Silva said. In her writing now and during her time at SCAD, Silva translates this into her UX work in the corporate world. “I’m always attracted to something that has to do with culture and to the intertwining of things, the intersectionality of who you are as a person, because that’s just the reality of everybody,” Silva said. Her fiction and creative nonfiction at SCAD explored themes of culture and identity, and her current pursuits are no different. Her commitment to shedding light on human differences has not and will not change.
In fact, storytelling is so vital to Silva’s success that she came close to paying for its absence in her work. “I almost got fired because I stopped telling stories,” Silva said. During her time at Amazon, as she was shifting from being a writer to a visual designer, she lost sight of how important it is to keep the humanity in what she does.
“We focus sometimes [as UX Designers] on the fluidity of a wireframe,” Silva said. “If there is a stutter in the flow, that’s a pain point.”
She rediscovered in this defining moment that a UX experience is just a story, and now she treats her work as such. “What I did was just change Word documents to sketch files,” Silva said. Silva continues to reflect on her past while looking forward to more opportunities. “I didn’t have a set of directions, and to this day I don’t know where I’m going to be in the next two years. But I do know that the connections that I’m making today are going to allow me to have something tomorrow. I’m holding very strong to who I am and my passions, and my passions are aligning to the connections I’m making,” Silva said.
