When I started DOK, I was fascinated by the beauty and raw feeling of architecture. It all started with admiration. The feeling of raw concrete’s brutally sharp edges and its character made me feel the need to share what I felt inside with anyone who was interested. This mission drove me to create this platform while juggling architecture semesters and later failed life paths.
My inner need to share this tension I’ve been feeling towards the architecture as a space and envoriment creation art that has the logic in it made me turn this platform into what its becoming today with 7 languages with growing interest from all the countries around the world. But as all things grow into something out of the planned in time this platform has been made more into a place thats mainstream and where general topics gets published to feed it everyday like trying to satisfy gods with sacrifices. All of which is a little further from my main mission, why I’m going on this journey and how I’m positioning DOK to be different from all the other -already successful- platforms.
From the things I said, it might seem that DOK as a platform is no longer aligned with my main goal, but that is not exactly true. Even though my main goal was to share the thrill I got from a building or an architectural creation, becoming multilingual and writing articles on different areas and topics made my ideas, opinions and feelings seen by more people like you. As of now, %75 of the traffic we get here is outside of Turkish. One language helps a lot to keep this ratio high with the increase we got from Japan, both because our catalog has grown with the recent addition of our translations, and as Japanese people obviously do their researches during the summer months too.
This multilingual approach has allowed me to reach almost every country in the world. And to those who may never have been able to read similar articles in their native language without compromising on original quality or content. As a person thats pretty much born into the world of computers, I believe last 2 decades our internet and each of us made the information be available to those not from the elites or those that holds wealth to every living soul searching for it. But in this era the main issue was and still is the fact that English is the ‘world’ language and anyone who does not speak it is missing out on a lot. But our Internet is not only for those who know English. So its apparent when the Internet made information more mainstream, it still couldnt achieve native language learning.
That’s where the Google Translate and DeepL like translation programs came into our lives to make us read and understand a paper from another language. Most of us learned English with the help of not finding the desired depth content in our native language. But what about other languages? What about Japanese? We do not even know the alphabet to pronounce the words properly let alone learn or try to understand a paper.
That’s the long explanation of why I made this site to show articles in 7 languages. If you say TL:DR, it’s about the quest to make knowledge more mainstream, using natural native language to explain the core of the article or topic being reviewed.
But at the core of it is a belief that we have. And that is the lost art of actually trying to believe and create. It’s a challenge of scale. It’s a commitment to see how far I can go for this mission. The way I see it, the main quest is exposure. The exposure of being out there with the words that you want to say and making it accessible to people by making it unique. That’s the search of a person who wants to learn something in their language with my words and my point of view. If we want to take into account the different worldviews and examples that may arise depending on where or in what culture the reader lives, we would be stuck guessing. I see that education or -if I must be more modest- sharing of information, should be universal if the seeking of it is universal.
And even in the days of despair or searching for meaning in emptiness, it has always been a choice to believe that the world is worth living and fighting and teaching for. Even in the days when being textbook correct does not provide lifelong peace, its a hope to believe that doing something with genuine interest is still worthwhile. And that is why I am so passionate about this platform. Because I make a choice every day to keep hoping for a better future, just like you guys make a choice every day to visit for the information, the photo, the inspiration, or just to see how we as humans of today are helping each other by creating and making it more and more accessible every day.
Or just like making a conscious decision every day to actually care about something. It’s not a passive search. Especially in the world we live in today, which is filled with false or misleading information. While our parents struggled to find information, we now face the challenge of determining what is real and correct through choice and research.
As I write this final chapter, I’d like to reiterate the fact that any attempt or effort we make to create a life worth living is a conscious choice and not a passive effect. Logically, our success and joy in life must come from making the right choices. But it’s very important to remember that if there is no choice that fulfills the mission, we always have the choice not to play the -rigged- game at all.
