Research Activity Explainer

I'm playing with how to engage you readers. I will try different things until I feel I am having an impact. So I've come up with a Research activity. Maybe its a poor word choice. Please don't be intimidated.

When working on an Exercise activity you should always have whatever you need to complete them. Its just you and the Exercise. To complete the Research activity you will need to draw on resources outside of yourself. Most of the time the internet will provide these resources, but I may ask you to use some other resource in particular.

Like other activities the results of the Reseach activity should be saved your personal design stockpile.

If you've got a better name for this activity let me know. Here are some synonyms for Research.

Exercise Activity Explainer

Remember that this blog is a work in progress. So I will be coming up with ideas to try out on the reader to see if they are helpful. I'll be asking you to do things that bring you into the design mindset. We'll start with Exercises.

An Exercise is an activity any reader can complete with a little time, self-reflection, and pen and paper. I will be asking you to concentrate on some part of your life-style in order to reveal and document your aspirations for living.

Keep whatever documents you develop from the activities in your Design Stockpile. We may come back to some in the future.

If you've got a better name for this activity let me know.

Welcome to The Year Before My Architect...

I want to welcome all of you to my experiment: The Year Before My Architect.

My goal is to introduce each of you to my perspective on the world of design and architecture, give you skills that will help you attain a home that is truly yours, and produce a physical collection of ideas and images that describe the home of your dreams.

I've had a little trouble getting this off the ground. I keep wanting it to be perfect before I move forward. I've let that become a crutch. So instead of attempting to birth a perfect idea into the world, I'll begin by stumbling.

So far I am thinking I will come up with a couple activities per week to get you thinking about architecture and how you want your house to be designed.

Some will be about collecting images from the web or from magazines, some will be questions that will help you discover more about what you want, and still others will look at how we organize our lives. I haven't worked all these out yet but the idea is to provoke you to think about what you want from your home. I will try to post these activities regularly, and to adapt and grow and change to meet your needs. Let me know how I'm doing.

As we go along you can incorporate assignments into a Design Stockpile. (It will be like a sketchbook of design ideas.) After some time working with and documenting life-style ideas you should have a great resource to bring to a designer, builder or Realtor. Better than that, you should have a better understanding of what will be best for you and your family.

Thank you for taking your valuable time to read my blog and work through some of the activities. If you do find the information here helpful or interesting please tell someone about it.

Take care and good luck,

Paul Cline
Architect