Reflective Summary: My Blog-Writing Journey
My urban design learning journey
For me, urban design is a new profession that is both strange and familiar. Obviously, it combines various professional knowledge such as architecture, landscape, and planning, but at the same time it has its own perspective of thinking at different scales in the city, which I have never been exposed to before. My undergraduate studies in human geography and urban planning focused more on city-to-city regional issues, so this multi-perspective, multi-scale research direction is exciting to me. The Urban Design course made me start to pay attention to the functions and connections of various elements in the city, and made me realise the complexity and possibilities of designing an area at the urban scale. I am very grateful to the lecturers for introducing us to different topics of urban design principles in each of the lectures. I feel that this is complementary when working on an urban design project, as each lecture demonstrates how different perspectives affect and influence urban design at the urban design scale. I enjoyed one of the lectures that focused on smart cities and child-friendly cities. It helped me to reflect on who cities are designed for, and to think about who the real users of cities are and how to meet their needs. It also inspired me to think about the city in five or even ten years’ time, what it will look like in the future and how it should be designed.
Trying Blog Writing for the First Time
Innovation and reflection is what drives me in this course. There is no doubt that blogs and essays are not the same form of writing, because of the need to take into account the readability of the articles, I had to look for topics that are close to my life and introduce the topic to the general public in simple terms, while using critical and reflective language that triggers the public’s thinking. I would look for a lot of academic papers to support the argument of the article, and I would also pick successful design cases to present, which can attract readers’ interest in reading. The process was interesting and challenging. I thought it was a great opportunity to practice my writing skills and expression. At the same time, it helps to develop my critical thinking skills and can be a good way to expand my mind.
Blog creation has a subtle sense of responsibility and achievement for me. I hope that through the efforts of my classmates and I, we can provide readers with more interesting reading material and make more people understand the charm of urban design. When I see the readers’ comments and discussions on the website, I think this is the meaning of the existence of the blog.
Prospect
I sincerely hope that this blog site can be run better and better, which is the result of the joint efforts of every student and teacher. I think it will be even better if in the future the site can be made more informative and interesting. Perhaps we could show the students’ design projects on the website for more people to see, which would help us get more positive feedback and be an important way for designers to understand the public perspective. I think it would be more challenging and meaningful.
