Icebreaker: The beginning of the journey

My background

When I was applying for postgraduate, I considered many majors that interested me, Urban Design, Environmental Design, Interior Design and so on. In the end, I chose urban design because, in my first impression, urban design was a macro-level course that involved many areas that I did not have the chance to touch during my undergraduate career, such as culture, climate, living habits, etc. After searching for more information about Urban Design online, I learnt that Urban Design is not only a macro-level course but also a specific large subject supported by data. As time goes on, more and more things are added to this huge subject, like municipal engineering, urban economics, Environmental Psychology and so on.

First impressions of the course

For me, Urban Design is a new subject which asks me to acquire more new knowledge. I studied environmental design as an undergraduate, which emphasizes more on the relationship between people and the environment. So they are two different courses, Urban Design contains more things. It deals with large-scale organization and design in cities. Urban design deals with the organizational relationships within a group of buildings and the spaces between them.

My experience

As we all know, Urban Design does not deal with the architectural design of individual buildings, but after I learnt Environmental Design, I have a better understanding of buildings and people’s feelings, because I paid much attention to try to understand people’s feelings and thoughts when they are in the buildings or open spaces. Thus, these experiences can be used in Urban Design areas to try to deal with the problems between people and the environment, I can improve the urban environment from many aspects such as environmental psychology, ergonomics, architecture and so on. I once worked on a vegetable market project. At that time, I had to think deeply about the city when selecting the location, traffic, flow of people, geographical location are all worthy of our careful consideration.

In conclusion, hope I can gain more knowledge in this course and make contributions to urban development.