Design process

Having studied landscape architecture for more than 5 years, I have developed my own process of design. Sometimes, it comes with good design, but sometimes not. I am wondering why some designers can always have creative and wonderful designs, practice and the scope of landscape sight might be important, but I think personal design process is the key to build a well-done design. 

After reading the article, I feel like that there are a lot of improvements on my design process. First of all, intuitive design, as the beginning of a design, which creates frameworks that are evocative and make people recall their experiences. Sometimes I do not think carefully about the certain atmosphere when people use the space, which may not be appropriate for the site. Second, rational design. The rational part of design reminds me of consistency and specifications. It may produce some specific questions, for example, how to make connections? How to turn corners? How to drain a surface? Such information is hard to transmit. I need practice as much as I can to make my design more reasonable. 

Looking back to my undergraduate school, I learnt my design process from my teachers, some of my teachers might have good ways for design, but they might not suitable for me. For example, there was a design class the teacher wanted us to design a riverfront park, it was a huge site and it is located in another province which is far way from my city. I never designed such large area like this before, the teacher showed us some precedents before we started. I could be creative about this design, but I lost my scale about this site. I was thinking too much about the details and didn’t pay much attention on the integrity of the whole site. As a result, My design was totally out of the right track. Here I want to emphasis is when I meet some new problems in my design I always feel it is hard to get started. This article just gives me a certain direction that I can work on it. I would like to focus on how I can make people get involved in the designed space, and how I can increase their experience of it.

Today, the traditional process of landscape design has changed, it not just includes observation, adaption and evolution. The new landscape are requiring the new generation of landscape designers to find better solutions to meet people’s needs. In urban area, people are eager to have more green space, but they also need something more, they want space to walk dogs, they need paths for running, some of them like water features. Therefore, the new landscape design should concern about quality, constructability, meaning and durability. In the process of my design, it will confront the the pressure on natural resources and sustainability through climatic, economic, social, cultural and environmental change.

The theory of how the brain work provides me a framework to remember the steps to design. Only the two part of the brain work together can comes a good design. Using intuition to design is important, because it may come out more creative design. But the design also need be smart enough to face the future problems. Landscape architecture can be viewed as the main orientation in contemporary design, it plans people and space in time. It is controversial, because new designers can always find a better solution than before. For now, our designs should stand at the top for years, even decades. So it is depending on our design process, a good design process will help us take as much problems as possible into consideration, then we will use our creative ideas to solve them.