First impression

Time flies, the first semester’s courses have come to an end. This semester, I tried blog writing for the first time as a blogger. Basically, this experience is very novel and has benefited me to a large extent. When I first heard about blog creation, I was very excited. To be honest, I enjoy posting my ideas on social media and commenting on other comments, so creating and running my own website is very tempting for me.

Growth process

In this course, I have published two blogs, one about child friendly city design and the other about smart cities. Before writing my blog, I searched online for many related cases.

For the child friendly urban design, I firstly discussed how to build child-friendly cities in four areas: safety, accessibility, recreational space, and participability. And then, I give vivid examples from different places: Adventure Amusement Park in London and Sham Shui Po Child Friendly Street in Hong Kong, all of which highlight the importance of recreational spaces and facilities for child-friendly spaces. It is worth mentioning that, I’m really interested in Adventure Amusement Park in London, which is a playful public space surrounded by sand. Adventure amusement park focuses on cultivating children’s imagination and sense of adventure. This park will intentionally provide some risks, allowing children to cultivate risk awareness in a controlled gaming environment, rather than enduring similar risks in an uncontrolled and ruleless world.

At the same time, I read other classmates’ blogs on the website from time to time. Some are about transport and sustainability, some are about community engagement. Although I haven’t done much extracurricular extension learning on these topics, I can still quickly understand the relevant knowledge through the summary of other classmates’ blogs. For example, I am well aware that car exhaust can have a negative impact on the urban environment, but I don’t have much ideas on how to improve this issue. Until I read Ziyu’s blog, she proposed two strategies: finding cleaner energy and promoting eco-friendly transportation.

Summary

This semester’s blog creation journey has solidified my design foundation and enabled me to make significant progress in my professional field. For example, I have conducted more case studies and personal interpretations for different types of urban design (child friendly city design). The experience I gained from these cases will be helpful for future design. At the same time, blog creation, reading and commenting on other classmates’ blogs (sustainability, transport, health and wellbeing, community and neighbourhood…) have given me the ability to think dialectically about various elements of urban design.

To conclude, I have mastered the basic skills required to become a blogger. Additionally,  it also honed my ability to conduct in-depth research and discussion on a specific topic. For next semester’ blog course, I hope to maintain my current enthusiasm, and to create and comment on blogs with more dialectical and critical thinking.