I have been actively thinking about my thesis, and I have been struggling to talk about why designers are good at what they do… or better yet, why emotional content is so important to anything we design ( which is why i think designers contribute as much as they do). And the way that that gets achieved as designers is by developing that sensitivity which is not taught in school, it comes with personal reflection and and understanding that whim, magic and the unexplained, is as much part of human need as money , or food or task accomplishment. In another recent lecture by Haakon Faste, a HCI prospective faculty, I saw a lovely hierarchy system which caught my attention. It was a way of ordering human needs based on manslows views.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a succinct and incredibly simple way at seeing how our world works. Every major product that you have ever owned falls into one of these categories, and in some cases the higher you go up in the pyramid, the less the needs manifest themselves as something physical and the more it becomes something intangible. How does all of this wrap to Mary Coleman’s lecture? Simply put, at Pixar , story is king, and where does she work? she works in the department that develops these stories. And why do stories matter so much? well because the reason Pixar is so powerful in my eyes, is because they are in one of the higher places in the hierarchy of need, yet their impact emotionally on me is much grater than my need of having a piece of fruit or bread. Of course if i was a foodie you could argue that food could produce a similar high as a Pixar’s movie emotional charge.

I have always been incredibly curious as to the process by which these ideas get developed at Pixar, I had always envisioned brilliant minds coming up with these genius ideas by themselves in a dark room with a sketchbook, and a candle. Yet i was surprised to find that the majority of story ideas start out as one line pitches that plant a seed, and then get workshopped with a group of story developers to find the potential. And with time (almost 2 years) as a team they refine a carefully crafted story that has happy moments sad moments, humor beauty magic, but most importantly heart. Other major animation studios have tried to equal Pixar on many aspects, and in some cases I have seen movies that have come incredibly close (Kung Fu panda is at the top of my list. ), but for the most part they seem far from achieving the quality of emotion portrayed by Pixar.

It all comes full circle because heart ( not love, but warmth and that positive vibe you get from movies with heart) is perhaps on the least important sections of maslows pyramid. My research is about the emotional value of design, and how we can consider it an equal or weighty aspect of the work we do. Pixar’s story development environment fascinated me because the exploration to find that string that pulls at your empathy nerve, is something that should be equally matched by designers, perhaps not in the final product, perhaps in the creative process perhaps even as a means to understand the problem, but it should be prominent rather than perhaps simply a sensitivity.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="705" caption="Image from Pixar's UP (Images TM & © 1986 - 2010 Pixar. All Rights Reserved.)"][/caption]

Mary was simply fun, because she engaged us on the idea that Pixar is not a one man creative band its a iterative process ( also a trait heavily shared with design), but while entertainment may need to deal with emotions in a more explicit way, whats to say that our experiences and interactions should not carry that type of power an weight? Whats to say that what we do in prototyping is not equivalent to workshopping a story idea, and whats to deny that our goal should not be to improve an experience but to induce and experience….? who knew this would come out from a lecture about animated movies….

In this initial paragraph i can begin to sum up why I have been lacking the words to speak about design as I used to. And it is perhaps this hesitation and time to sit and think about my hesitation that has given me clarity as to what it is that needs to be said. Not just fluff commentary on visual design which is easily done, but really dig deep as to why design matters. I hope the few who read designloom have not been too disappointed at my absence these past few months. But be sure to check back as I will be posting on some intriguing ideas of the nature, practice, future and possibilities of design in this new decade. In the meantime be happy and be creative!

Juliana

While I do not believe he said anything new that would dramatically change the way i see design, he was exceptionally good at highlighting valuable points about how to present yourself as a designer and grasp the things one needs to focus on to fully succeed in your quest to become a better designer

*Here are some notes on his talk. (i plan to expand them into coherent paragraphs but, not just yet!

“Its never been a better time to be a designer ”

It no longer about making things pretty, well that’s obvious but why? Because people have understood that the problem is less specific and broad reaching. Its not about just making it pretty, it about competing, surpassing the competition and changing the world.

Former models include a set budget and a list of task oriented goals that need to be delivered, vs and exploration of how to see the vision of a company in the future. What do you give them… ? road maps, experience architecture, knowing how to shift companies as a massive entity. A problem like the turbochef, that deal with not just changing the paradigm of the look and feel, but the interface and ultimately the behaviors of the user who needs to understand the changes of cooking in less time.

Think broader about what design means, pragmatic solutions vs ecosystems.

There is more to design than usability. Its ok to sacrifice the usability if it delivers on the overall experience, how do we make it powerful to make it engaging and make you choose.

Can everything be one click away ( sprint ) where usability was the focus, but its about the magic behind it.

Behavioral shift of usability. We are not making things easy to use, but making things last longer.
How can technology improve the checkout process. How do you apply it in a high level store like prada.
World health day is a course of dreaming - dissemination of a message and people to connect, write stories to a website that get broadcast on times square.

Th HP touchsmart - help up make computing magical. - something that resonates something magic. How do you capture magic. wire framing . Visual design exercises, moved in to the shiny noir language , the magic comes from simulations. Manage the experience of a day to day feel like , the subtlety of how things change over time

Frog specified all of this stuff though code- xaml c# toolkit that you could - allow the dev team extend their work beyond frogs initial vision, rather than forcing the client to settle on that you hand them a partnership. Last longer than the software that ends up getting designed. how do you control the finite detail of those partnerships. Dreaming aesthetics, beauty poetry vision culture emotion behaviour passion humanity magic.

the subjectivity is intimidating , the higher up

123456 things that matter when applying for a job.
what separates me from the rest

Know your tools.
Your work is most constrained by the amount of time you have available. get faster at execution so you can spend more time thinking.

Know your methods
The names of the methods aren’t enough , you need to understand the underlying philosophical and psychological principles that make them work. You are a strategist, and intellectual, ( does it really matter? in the end ? )

Speak with confidence and passion
Your personality displays what you audience to feel. Energy is contagious: so is apathy

Show work YOU did
Team projects are great but make sure you include work that you can claims as yours-entirely

Frame the larger context
Don’t just tell what you did- explain why you did and why you learned.

Craft us really really important
Its all about details.Alignment font color spelling grammar tone composition.
We are getting taken more seriously.

How to Nurture Future Leaders

Business Week magazine takes a stab at how Design thinking brings creative techniques to business. The only problem? No one can agree on how to teach its methods
Read Article Here
Is this the trend? Can it hold or is it just a fad?

When i first read his post, I was pretty much swept off my feet. He was describing in a very accurate way, something that has become my current environment at my job. And it struck me that I was not only stupid for thinking it was only my company that worked like Google does, but that the feeling its designers have about the methods of getting things done were being reciprocated if not mimicked by me.

I have no complains about my job, but I also know the realities of being a designer in an engineering environment. I was speaking not too long ago with a UI Engineering Manager at Apple, and i was telling him about how hard it is to get a design point across some times, and he responded quickly without hesitation, “welcome to silicon Valley”. This comment hit me across the face like some kind of giant slap. Had i been so naive to not see it coming, or was i really facing a completely unique development process for the first time? It turns out it was a little of both, and to my incredible surprise, i was completely immersed in the roots and depths of what a metric driven environment is all about.

Less than 4 months ago, i wrote a post about how metric driven design was the elephant in the room designers struggled to acknowledge, and it seems now almost funny, because back then i thought it was my inexperience and my newness to the idea of testing that made me think that it all felt like a very unnatural component to be placing in design. I thought i was in a bubble of idealism floating in a sea of delusion, and that soon enough the system would ware me down to the point of simply taking the numbers in stride and becoming a vocal supporter of them.

Four months later I am neither a hater nor a follower. Mr Bowman’s eloquent writings of the ill fate of metric driven design is not without merit, but he too acknowledged the strength behind the numbers. Google like my own company have managed incredible amounts of success as a result of being able to use numbers to focus the resources of the company to develop ideas that will most likely work. Innovation while being a novel concept, is but a byproduct of being able to deliver on the improvement in performance of things that have already been produced, and refining them till they reach that sweet spot where no more can be done or a newer idea with better results can replace it. And this is the safe path, the path of least resistance, the one that lets you get from point A to point B because you’ve measured the possible outcomes of every option between c-z and you are left but with one choice. Its the tendency to lean rather than lunge forward, in the hopes of not investing too much effort or focus and get enough of a signal to then cast yourself forward with full strength. I equate it to Indiana Jones and the last crusade; engineers need to see the path before they can build for it, weather that’s by tossing sand on an invisible rock bridge or by testing the hell out of a feature on a site, designers are more likely to take that first step as a blind leap of faith and hope to find something to hold them up at the end of that initial stride. Mind you the key factor is that both start with the same amount of information, but only one is utilizing the gut feeling that Mr. Bowman speaks off. It is almost part of the designers process to act this way, because its this instinct that generates that human component that allows people to connect to something designed.

I believe strongly that any sort of product development can’t be devoid of either approach, but it seems far more of a greater challenge to convince people to spend the time and effort on ideas that are less safe and less predictable, and this is no surprise at all. It just seems like a very impossible task to ask designer to do what they do best while also trying to apeace the non designers and simultaneously justify why taking the risk matters in the end.

I guess i should stop trying to re write what he wrote, after all he probably explained it better than i could ever dare to try, but amidst all the conversations back and forth, it seem inevitable to think that designers should ultimately learn to accept the numbers fully, it seems almost like a betrayal of the core factors that makes us creative. I don’t think for a second that metrics are a bad thing, but i am also smart enough to know that there needs to be a line clearly drawn in the sand, that separates or at least clarifies how much of these numbers are to be trusted as suggestions or advice and how much of it is gospel. I for one think no number should ever be the reason why a design decision is done, as its far to isolated to convey what the “best ” thing for any site could be, metrics tend to be so focused that one number could help one aspect of the site, but is that really tackling the overall user experience if that one factor is looked at so closely.

A metric should help reinforce the practicality of an idea not, validate it, it should help look at its progress but not dictate its direction.

I have come to understand the need for numbers, and i have learnt from many engineers the need to keep these present in our lives, but I’m not about to relinquish the fight of what it means to design for the best user experience as a whole, and i think this is where metrics can be most damaging if let loose, as they make us loose focus and the ability to see the all to often forgotten bigger picture.

It is because of this that Designloom finally got a proper brand. In late 2008 i started drawing the options of what that could be. I wanted something fairly geometric, and open; using Shaun Inman’s logo for fever

as an inspiration, i wanted something that conveyed clean equally balanced strokes . The more and more i refined the idea in my head the more i found a closer sense of what i wanted on the page. I knew typography for the actual words would be key, but secondary to the graphic i would be developing, as this would in turn be the one recognizable visual item that people could use to identify my work and site. All in all the type and the icon would speak to each other; the “design” word in the logo would be delicate and thin, like branches, and the “loom” would be heavier more like the trunk of a tree and one would reference the round aspects of the icon. In the end i used 2 typefaces which i know many people consider to be a crime, but i had my reasons!

The end result is what ive internally labled as the branch . A set of combined shapes that allude to leaves, capping of at the top with what feels like the beggining of a bloom.

I was extremely excited to release this into the wild, I wanted to start branding my work with this immediately and did so first on the relaunch of my portfolio, and now in the last 2 days with the blog. How ironic that it is on this day that a very popular web magazine focused on design would chose to write about my blog ( and many others) as a good example of web typography. Why? well because before the Designloom brand had been finalized and launched, the blog reflected one of the more handmade aspects of my design work. I had taken a very simple font, and overlapped it on top of one of my hand drawn decorative illustrations. This created the headline and top section of my blog, and something that i have gotten a good amount of attention from others viewing my site.

I will probably expand on this topic in a later date, but one thing i still consider key in web design, is knowing that sometimes its key to create environments that dont separate us too much from our humanity. hand drawn illustrations, type and elements are part of different techniques that designers can utilize to bring life to the web in ways that are not tied to how the code displays things. This is perhaps why the old designloom typography was successful, because it managed to live in its environment without causing much disruption, but serving the ultimate purpose of communicating where you where and speaking to the type of place you were in.

What a disappointment it must be for those who have linked through to my blog and stumbled on a site that no longer exemplifies that unique treatment of type, more importantly what will the backlash be for my new logo? will it die at the hands of the few who feel like i’ve changed the site for the worse, or will it be embraced as part of the natural evolution that comes from being a designer. I love that my work is getting noticed, but now i sit on this very precarious ledge that leads me to question my own decisions with my design. Perhaps it was fine as it was before, maybe i should have let sleeping dogs lie…

on the other hand, what growth could i have achieved if i never truly ventured into the realm of properly branding my online experience.

A very special thanks to Matt Cronin for giving my little blog some designlove, and i hope i have not disappointed him to much with the recent changes.

This past month i have had some random brushes with fame, through film festival parties and some other events along the way. In most cases i act a little bit below my years and indulge in the act of drooling over certain people, weather its because i admire their talents, or because the celebrity factor gets the better of me. But when i think about it, its all trivial, the oggeling and the groveling over some of these people. I mean seriously they are just people.

THAT IS UNTIL you meet the people that matter. I saw a young man perform tonight, and he put on a great show, with a crowd that not only had not heard any of his music, but was there to see the follow up act ( one i totally bailed on so i could drive home in order to wake up for a 9AM meeting tomorrow). He tried his bestest to get this crowd going, but it was unfortunately small and lacking the attention span to appreciate  what they had before them.

Most people will laugh at me for posting some of this, if anything simply because ive been known to have the musical taste of well a 12 year old, but my sense music and eclectic mix of likes and dislikes has meant i hear just about everything you put in front of me and for the most part can identify things i like in almost anything from country to rap. I am a true connoisseur of movie soundtrack and perhaps the only area i will be extremely knowledgeable on, but with the rest of the music out there, i simply listen to things and find the ones i like and carry them with me until the end.

Needless to say as i heard Mr. Eric Hutchinson this evening, at the Catalys in Santa Cruz, i felt that combination of slight starstruck and giddyness, but also a sense of respect and admiration for someone who writes music i not only love listening too, but ADORE singing. Its music that connects with me at a much deeper level. If today in that room of people who simply don’t know who Eric is and who will maybe just maybe scratch their heads for 2 seconds and listen closer to figure out what it is they’ve just heard and how catchy it is…. then i can safely say Eric has done his job, and I can be happy that more people can marvel in the melodic goodness that is his music.

The stage is like a little bit of playhouse for him, you see his moves clearly without hesitation, which are very controlled and calculated. but he comes of fresh as a butterfly, and can be as self deprecating as the rest of us, particularly the comment made just before the last song of his set were he kindly reminded those folks who where just stepping in the room that they had just “missed his entire set…thanks”. The snarky tone and the cool delivery make him so enjoyable to watch, that i kept hoping he would do the JT skit simply because in those few moment of folly, people can start to appreciate the skill it takes to sing as he sings and to carry the soulful tunes he carries so well and not be too serious or too full of himself! He did the best he could with the crowd that he got and that is a tough gig to do in the first place…..

I met him after the show, he signed the sheet music to one of his singles, and he let me take a picture of himself with me.

Of all my encounters with fame, this is perhaps the one that’s meant the most, not because it was status quo to be in admiration of the person on stage, but because I love the craftsmanship of his music, i love the way it makes me feel and i love the way it makes the trivial things kind of matter, because put simply that photo and that signature represent a true artist, and I have a lot of respect to have a little piece of that!

it also makes me want to sit at my piano and properly record the crap that i write, hahah cause for better or for worse that also makes me happy !

when bernadette comes I get lost on her time
she’s much too sweet and she’s always gonna be
when i return to her arms and her eyes
it might not be the same but it’s alright with me

Ok its all right with me - Sounds like this

went to a party on the side of a hill
met three latinas who had gotten their fill.
they told me “nobody ever gets us down on our knees
simply to help us take a load off our feet.”

Oh! - Sounds like this

If you get anything out of this, its that you need to listen to his music… and thats about as much PR as i can do for the man!!!!

It has taken me the better part of 3 months to digest my GRE experience. The Graduate Record Examination is a standardized test used to evaluate possible candidates who are seeking a graduate degree. I am one of those candidates. In the fall of 2008 i started the process of applying to graduate school, to pursue a masters degree in Interaction design. I had long been thinking that this was a path i wanted follow and i felt it was in the perfect point in my career where I had gathered enough experience, a strong resume and a portfolio that were worthy of acceptance into some of the programs I wanted. While to date i have only heard back form one of the schools, regarding  my application, one thing has struck me about the entire process of applying to grad school.

The first and most painful thing to admit about the whole thing, is the time it takes to get the whole thing started, completed and mailed or submitted. And while i would love to dive into the whole process which has taught me a series of important lessons regarding scheduling and process. There is one thing in the entire process which can’t go without some form of commentary or call out simply because the irony behind it is so good that i could not just let it sit there.

I started this post with saying that the GRE is a test that is usually required for admission to most of these schools. When i went through the application requirements, i squirmed immediately as soon as i saw that a standardized was required. Aside from the basic fact that math is one of my weakest subjects, I had for a long time thought i was done with it and basically archived it in my mind. When the realization that this was going to be my biggest hurdle, i decided to attack the problem head on. I knew my strength was clearly not in numbers, as i had spent the last 9 years not even once considering a mathematical formula or problem. And while most people will point out that math in these exams is pretty basic, for a mind who has made a distinct effort to pretty much block it out, the math aspect of this exam was scaring me to no end. Like i said, i dived in, i started a prep course with kaplan and went on to get a math tutor to help me refine my skills as much as possible and after 3 months of preparation. I took the test. IT DID NOT GO WELL.

I would like to say that many reasons could have contributed to my utter failure, but if i could really pinpoint it on 2 things, the ones i want to call out the most are time, and DESIGN…

Our world is constantly evolving, and while some things may lag behind the times as far as technology and implementations are concerned, most of our every day interactions with technology seem to move at an equal pace that seems comfortable and for the most part not too awkward. Most basic interactions evolve in tandem to each other, everything from ATM’s to cashier checkouts, to the way you pay for gas at the pump to how you use your mobile phone, and how that is reflected on other household appliances and consumer goods.  There are always exceptions to this, the GRE interface is one HUGE And horrid abomination of what a test experience can be.  Its seems like the last 10 years of interface design and user paradigms have been intentionally been neglected by whomever decided to design this test interface. i have been forced to sit in a computer for 3+ hours trying to answer questions on a screen that makes me feel so uncomfortable, i would have paid to have the test be on paper and manually write my essays rather than sit in front of the screen these people seemed to have deemed appropriate for test taking.

When i sat down i was not only sitting in a station that was filthy, but for the lack of a better description, a station that felt like it was back in 1995. As my test started, i was introduced to a black and white almost DOS like screen. No text aliasing no colors, and a resolution that I can only imagine was somewhere around 600×400.

What is so wrong about this? At this point the SAT fill in bubble answer sheet would have been a better experience. I couldn’t seem to grasp how a company that is the sole provider of standardized testing, that has a market cornered when it comes to these types of test and generates enough income from each of the students who sign up, could in fact be so careless to provide people with the type of experience they provide. I know that they are trying to generate an experience that can be replicated in multiple countries and under multiple technical restraints. Im sure the back end application that runs the tests is lightweight simply so that it can be run on machines that perhaps are from 1995 simply because that’s the only option available. However taking into account how the Internet has managed to deliver information across as wide a spectrum as it has, in such visually compelling ways, it seems unusual that these folks would consider themselves as limited as this experience leads me to believe they are.

How is it possible that while i read an article no longer that 3 paragraph long, an article that i have to reference multiple times in order to write a response to it, i am I forced to scroll every time i want to read the next paragraph. How is it that there is no manipulation of the text sizes that display on the screen. Why is it i have to read 4 or 3 words per line before i move on to the next, when simple convention states that I can read as much as 2 whole alphabets before my eyes start having problems deciphering lines ….I simply don’t grasp how this interface with its ABCD options made it past as many people with little number of complaints.

Perhaps im spoiled and maybe the irony is only understood by me, but the result of said test might be the deciding factor on weather or not I get to go to school precisely so i can better understand how to best deliver these types of human computer interactions to people. All because the overall test experience that was used to take one of the entrance exams is so poorly designed that my focus shifted constantly to how much i could not only fix this, but make it acceptable to 2008.

Maybe my ADD is to blame, I should have just focused on answering the question and moved on. And i did as much of that as my brain let me …. but at the end of the day my gut reaction and the instinctively negative experience i had with the interface will forever mare the GRE for me. I have had all sorts of apprehensions about taking it again. Some of them simply in protest of having paid as much money as I did, for something that feels like it was designed and built in 1990 and has not changed since.

Why is reconciling this design problem so important to me at this point? because this specific interface taught me a good lesson in design principles, just because you know it can be one way doesn’t really mean it will be that way. This is true of almost any set of expectations one has on just about any subject or topic, but for me it seems that design often creates paradigms which are hard to break out of, and when we do encounter them as different entities of our everyday experience, they can cause a minor hindrance or hurdle. Its almost like the importance of having software be able to be backwards compatible… do our minds need to have said ability in order to properly process things, or can we push the learning curve to too high a place so that the basics then have to become another learning experience.

Interface design battles consistency and paradigms shifts on an almost daily basis, simply because humans evolve and with it technology also evolves, but at what point do we cease to worry about what we have left behind, and more importantly how much effort are people really putting forth to make current experiences feel current and how long will that current aspect last before the next paradigm is introduced? Is it best to keep everything Wicked simple in the hopes of catching everyone on the same playing field? nd having them not struggle to learn something new?

Im still on the, “if its worth building then its worth building right” camp… but some can argue this point easily, and that becomes a whole other post!

The American Visa is a document that has reached an almost ephemeral status among immigrants. It is highly sought after, and most of the times, highly unattainable. So those of us who are lucky to obtain an American visa, guard it with our lives. The process is simple once you have been approved, but the bias and the profiling that occurs while you are trying to get it is one of the more shameful and hard things to witness as a person.

In Colombia, a nation that suffers with a stained reputation, that conjures images of drug lords and violence, the process to find yourself in possession of an American visa is such the ordeal, that it merited a post on my blog. Mostly because the act of acquiring it is so tedious, so humiliating and so difficult that it seems  crazy that people submit themselves to it.

For those who are unaware as to how people enter the USA as a foreigner from a non first world nation, this is what the typical person must go through. If i have the desire to travel to America for any particular reason, weather it be for business or pleasure, as a citizen of countries like Colombia, or Venezuela, or Bolivia, i must obtain a visa from the designated consulate in my home country. In Colombia the process is extensive and convoluted, in hopes of weeding out those that really don’t want to go thorough as much as is requested by the embassy. Initially like with any sort of errand you need an appointment. In most peoples mind the idea of an appointment to obtain a visa is not absurd, it becomes absurd when you see how the appointments are run.

To obtain said appointment, a Colombian national must first pay a fee to be able to call the embassy scheduling office. This initial fee of $16.00 for 15 minutes of the operators time is already a steep price to pay , but this is hardly the most expensive thing that comes along in the entire process.

Once you have paid at a designated bank, you will be given a pin number which represents your access to the scheduling system. You then call the operator to set up your appointment. Because the demand for visas is so extraneously high in Colombia, days and weeks are booked end to end. On average you will receive a date 4 or 5 days from the day you called. In the average mind of most people, this seems like a good place to be. You have an appointment and you are set to go into the embassy. However in Colombia, the embassy sets hundreds of appointments at one given time. Ive gathered that they have 4 allotted times by which they set appointments too. Starting with 7am and going every half hour till 9am. This gives the embassy roughly 4 blocks by which to separate people into.

So now you have a date and a time. The next step is you have to go to the bank yet again to pay for the process. While naturally you would expect to pay only after you’ve received the document you are trying to process, in Colombia EVERYBODY pays regardless of the outcome. While i could understand that the demand on the resources of the embassy is high enough to merit having to pay a basic transaction fee, the fact that everyone pays the entire processing fee astounds me. Why does it astound me? because the fee they charge is astronomical. For $141.00 dollars or roughly 318.000.00 pesos you can get a visa IF you are approved but that’s a big if, and that’s a big fee if you don’t get it. Even crazier is that if your a family of four traveling to Disney for the first time, it becomes $141.00 x 4 . While you could potentially budget for this fee in your travel plans, you have to imagine that the average Colombian family household has one income maybe two incomes, and of those 2 incomes, the potential for them to be minimum wage is Very Very high. Which means out of these two incomes which potentially can amount to 900.000.00 pesos, just the fee for 2 people to pay for visa would wipe the monthly income of this family down to 100.000.00 pesos. Yes its true not everyone is on a minimum wage in Colombia, but if they were, this poses an almost impossible challenge to pay for the visa to begin with. This of course is also intentional as its another way of weeding out those who can’t simply afford it, or afford to waste that kind of money. Even more earth shattering is the fact that your chances to receive a tourist visa into the US a Colombian citizen earning a minimum wage is almost 0.

The money issue aside, leads us to the actual appointment and appearance before a consulate. While I would love to say it involves a nice office and desk and an interview across said desk, the truth is more like cattle being herded through a small opening in a field, or some sort of detention center, where you sit waiting endlessly for a number to be called and your turn to talk to a human being.

Like i said, I am one of the lucky ones. I have paperwork from the US backing up y claim, I also have a job and a slightly higher income than the average Colombian, simply because i am employed in the USA. So my process is more routine than anything, but this does not mean im not equally scared to get that rejection that everyone fears, seeing as they make it crystal clear to all who walk through the walls of the American embassy that NOTHING guarantees you getting or renewing a visa.

So my adventure continued as after having completed the endless task of errands for the appointment, i show up at the embassy on a Thursday morning at 7:30 AM along another 200 people designated for my time slot. This to any foreigner would sound crazy but the image of these 200 people is as follows. The American embassy in Colombia is a fortress if you will. Guarded by tall concrete walls. The main perimeter of the property is also sealed in by a metal fence. This fence is heavily secured, you know there is someone watching you through one of the many security cameras. You line up along said fence on a sidewalk which runs out fairly quickly and turns into the street. There are some nice young ladies helping people sort their applications, and while they scare most with questions about the details of your application, and promise to help out, they really don’t. You are in a chaotic line with no sense of what to do or why. Then over a loud speaker, that can barely be heard if your at the end of the line, they say that if you are applying for a certain type of visa you should move to a certain type of line labeled by a number. At this point i find that this might be my saving grace, as I know us working folk usually get grouped with students and we should be processed quicker as our requests are ” reasonable” by comparison.

You then get ushered through the fenced portion of the embassy, which includes a metal detector and a place to leave your cell phone. Once through that set of doors, you go through the main walled area of the embassy into a space, not a room, but a space that has a roof, a series of benches and roughly 30 nondescript windows with little telephones. This is where the feeling of cattle first becomes clear.

Those applying for the more specific visas like work or student visas, are told to follow a line into one of the windows and drop of our paperwork, where once we do, we are told to wait for our name to be called. I sit following said instructions with a copy of Little women in my hands but with little patience to read it. I wait for roughly an hour and half before they call my name. When they finally do i line up yet again, only to be fingerprinted and told that i have been assigned to a group with the number 744. I am again told to turn around sit back down and wait for the new group number to be called. I have assessed at this point that this grouping method is a quick way to separate people into manageable chunks the consulate folk can handle. As I turn back to sit back down i realize that by this point 5 hours have passed since i first arrived at the embassy and 4 and a half since i first entered the wall of the establishment, and clearly 3 away from getting anything done. The runaround seems pretty crazy, and why its done this way baffles me, but they have perfected a system by which they squeeze all possible hope from your system while you wait. In the wake of this i sit in the many rows of benches and see dejected families who in some case have traveled from various cities within Colombia ( visas are only issued in the embassy in Bogota) walk to the gates with heads down and stack of passports int he their hand, with a letter that  states why the government of the united states has denied their request for the visa or things they need to do if they wish to be reconsidered. I have not seent the paper first hand, but i have to imagine it must be a hard thing to read considering all the time you have already spent on the effort.

While i understand fully why the USA has to control its borders, some of this feels completely wrong, mostly because you know people have saved and spent time preparing for the possibility of going to America. And while their desire to stay may sit somewhere in the back of their brain…. i fear a lot of people simply want to travel but that could just be my naive nature speaking its mind. The list of relatives and people you know who have been denied is endless, cousins and aunts and friends have all gone through that process and been denied. And whats worse is they go through it multiple times. Its even more shameful that after the third or fourth time, the US embassy deems you worthy and grants you your visa. I like to think at that point they see the person has no intention of staying illegally, simply because they could have done it through other means by then, and the other is that it shows you have enough resources to spend 141 dollars multiple times and be ok with never seeing the results of that money.

I finally get called. To my surprise not with my numbered group but directly by name. I fear at this point that something is critically wrong. Why would i not be with my group, was something wrong with my paperwork? was i about to be denied? The amount of thoughts that raced through my head were incredible, what would i do with my apt in San Jose, my car, my belongings, my job? it just seemed like my world would have an implosion right then and there. Then as i walk to the window and i interview with the consulate. He does not allude to any mistakes but his tone is harsh and his Spanish very accented. i always figure i need to help these guys out and make their day a little better and speak to them in English. My English has always been flawless and i speak with a native American accent, therefore i feel like this would comfort them and ease them up a bit and see that i am not a threat but just another kid that grew up with the states who lives and works there and who one day wishes to become a resident. He asks me about me and my family what they do, how they do it and why out of all my direct family do i choose to live in the states. I have spent many years explaining that answer to people and with time i have come to see that the explanation is crap siply because, the answer to  why we are where we are is less about our calculated decisions and more about how we just chose to do things and how they played out.

He finally asks, “is there anything else you think we would like to know”. I reply “well what would you like to know?” and he then says, “your visa has been approved go pay the courier to get it delivered”. I do as he says and after seven and half hours, I have finally been freed from the clutches of the visa process. I walk away calm after having witnessed people lost and afraid of outcomes out of their control and spent time in a space that makes you wish you knew how to pace your mind so that you don’t go insane looking at the same things over and over again for hours on end.

As a post mortem on the whole experience. One of the more horrifying thing that happened that day was I rehashed a vicious cold i had fought to eliminate 2 weeks prior. The uncovered and unprotected shelter they provide leaves you exposed to wind and vastly common temperature shifts that occur in Bogota on a daily basis. It would seem that after collecting my money, they could at least afford to show us humans some dignity and comfort, considering they are well aware i will be spending 7  hours of my day and probably accumulated a solid day of my life in this place.