2023 Second Stage Reflexive summary

Harvest and Effective

Time flies, I am very excited and happy, and I can successfully complete the second stage of the course tasks. The second stage of the course took us to Ouseburn in Newcastle, Gateshead City Centre and Marmaladellane Community Centre in Cambridgeshire. These field trips and subsequent seminars brought me a very different experience, which made me really enter the course project. Experiencing the scale, topography, lighting, etc. of the living space. Communicating with local people and learning about the local terroir and culture. In the subsequent design, I was given a lot of different ideas and concepts about the community’s public space and open space. I learned that our design must not only have advanced ideas and concepts and use new technologies but also reflect humanistic care for nature and society. What people need is a warm design, not a cold tool. Among them, “future garden city design” and “smart city design” have become topics that I am particularly interested in. I will choose related topics as my graduation project and do more in-depth research later.

I think the above are some of the things I have gained in the course of the second period, and they are valid.

Insufficiency and improvement

There will be many ideas and concepts in the design process, but the expression and narrative still lack overall logic and cannot maintain the progressive relationship of ideas. I think I still haven’t been able to completely get rid of the limitations of spatial thinking and the problem of urban design perspective. I like to focus on the small details of the design, causing the space to be broken and messy, lacking the connectivity of the space. But later, through several exchanges and guidance with Professor Natalia, this problem has been improved in the 8069 course. In the future, I need to have a more comprehensive grasp of the overall situation and think about urban design as a whole.

Conclusion and future

I always find that writing a blog is a good way to summarise what I have learned over a period of time, and every time I write a blog I have new discoveries and feelings. It is a great and meaningful learning process. In the future, I will continue to review and summarise over a period of time.

In the second stage of the course, through a lot of local research, exchanges and visits, I have learnt a lot about the concepts and characteristics of British urban design, and I have gained a lot. In the future, I look forward to going to more different countries to experience, touch and feel more different styles of urban design. At the same time, I also observed that there are already many intelligent space nodes in British cities, and I hope that the UK can realise a systematic smart city in the future.