Talk:Design studies

Feeback from bluerasberry

Original research

Some of what I see seems like "original research", meaning your own value judgements of what is important without providing a source to establish its significance. There is some room for making claims on Wikipedia without providing citations, but when you do so, be conscious among yourselves that you have added information without providing a source, and consider whether you have made an arbitrary decision in a situation where others might have presented a different view. In the longer run, Wikipedia tends to choose whatever perspectives have actually gone into print in the most reliable sources, so the first favoritism is to the view which can cite sources.

Examples

• Foundational Figures - is this list your own creative invention, or have published reliable sources or any published history compiled a list of leading figures?
• "A battle in print began with Margolin’s article titled, “Design history " - I see citations to the debate and some discussions about a reprint. Do these sources really establish that this debate was central to the establishment of the field, or are you citing the papers and making your own argument that this debate established the field? What particular source do you have that presents a history of this debate and its significance?

Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Qualification of information

The issue includes a lot of qualification. Wikipedia prefers to publish conservative or orthodox views when possible, and to only name sources in the body of text when there is no orthodoxy.

Examples -

• "Cameron Tonkinwise claims that design studies, has been and mostly remains “for Design.” "
• "As Joanna Gooding’s PhD dissertation further explains,"
• "Clive Dilnot in his essay, Reasons to be Cheerful (Or Why the Artificial May Yet Save Us), clarifies that"
• "Bruno Latour writes in Actor-Network Theory, that ANT aims"
• "Cultural anthropologist, Claude Levis Strauss, suggested that two strategies"

What can you say about your process for deciding when to name a source in the body of text versus when to name the source in citation? What are you communicating by naming the source of a theory. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Journals and Professional Associations

In this section you list various journals and professional organizations and cite those journals and organization's own websites. It is easy to confirm that anyone with a business model in the field will make claims of their importance. Are you able to provide sources establishing third-party recognition of the place of these publications in the field?

The reason why Wikipedia often does not include lists of this sort is that we cannot include everyone, and if we allow listing orgs/publications without third party sources to cite, then the situation becomes someone's value judgement. We try to eliminate including value judgments removed from sources on Wikipedia because we want no discussion or debate about anything except the content in published sources.

If you choose to list some journals, to what extent have you chosen to exclude others? When you mention some organizations, why have you chosen to exclude others? Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Bias

Wikipedia tries to include global perspectives. Are you aware of any bias in your description of the field? Like for example, are there discussions about design studies in Latin America, the Arabic world, China, India, anywhere else, or among any demographic that is not joining the conversation in Western academia? We do not necessarily need to tell the story of another culture, but if we have reason to believe that other conversations exist then we might note that somewhere, and if we suspect that no other conversations exist, then there are ways of making a brief statement saying that we have no evidence that the current version of the article is excluding any established body of thought.

For example - is any Chinese language journal or organization having an impact on the direction of design in a way comparable to the ones you named? Why did you choose the journals and organizations that you did?

Why is "Development Outside Anglo-Saxon" its own section, whereas presumably the "inside anglo saxon" does not have a cultural label and seems presented by default? What parts of this article are universal, and what parts merit cultural labels like "design in the western world", "design here... there"? Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Lack of citations

The section "Research Methods and Related Fields" includes almost no citations. Why is this? If this is important enough to include in Wikipedia, then we expect that we can find this information in a published source and cite it. Can you say why you feel that this information is simultaneously important but at the same time you have been unable to provide citations to anyone in the field who published information like this? Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:44, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

correcting citations

Hello, I am going to be correcting the citations for this new entry shortly. If anyone has questions, please feel free to contact me directly. Thank you Dsstudent (talk) 23:28, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Lists

The new Design studies entry is very welcome - thanks and congratulations to those who started this. The feedback comments from blueraspberry are also welcome. I would like to add that the long lists of people within the article seem inappropriate, and lists are usually a bad idea because they just keep getting added to and become less and less reliable and useful. It might be relevant to mention a few 'foundational' people who were especially important in founding and developing design studies, but the list of 'contemporary figures' will become longer and longer, as will the list of 'other seminal thinkers". I suggest deleting all three lists. Nigel Cross (talk) 14:41, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

Lists

Thank you Nigel for your feedback. I'll spend some time on the page this coming week and incorporate your comments. Dsstudent (talk) 02:59, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Many thanks for deleting that particular list. I know it's a hard thing to do, after you spent so much time uploading it! Nigel Cross (talk) 14:05, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Links

Half of the citation links do not have hyperlinks.KJarvis.2 (talk) 22:02, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

The link in citation 21 goes to a broken website Samjgreer (talk) 22:48, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

Citation 1 is good. Most of the citations come from reliable sources. --Ekf22 (talk) 01:21, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

Too much information

The article isn't easy to read and has lots of unimportant or unneeded information. The section "Approaches and Scope" can be added either to the introduction or in another section. Too much information can confuse the readers. Why is this information added and what information has been left out if any? 14alexa (talk) 01:09, 24 September 2019 (UTC)

MDV13 (talk) 05:17, 26 September 2019 (UTC)Needs more accurate sourcingMDV13 (talk) 05:17, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

Developments from the Global South - Too Opinionated

This section is written in a way that argues a point - "design needs decolonization." It is, in a sense, a biased section of this page as it argues a stance that the "Decolonising Design Group" takes. Information should remain neutral. If the entire article is talking about the Design Studies discipline, it should remain as a strictly informative piece of writing for the discipline to those seeking information regarding it. Blabio (talk) 01:52, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

Far too much everything

I edited out some recent additions of 'Foundational Figures' because the people may well be scholars in the field but were not 'foundational'. But looking over all the article and the Talk comments, there really is too much of everything here. 'Too opinionated', 'Too much information', 'Too many [indiscriminate] lists'; too much of everything. As mentioned in the early Talk feedback comments above the whole article is written in a subjective, essayist style rather than the objective, encyclopedia style of Wikipedia. It needs a lot of work, and a lot of cutting, to shape it into a decent, reliable Wikipedia article. Over coming weeks (and probably months) I will try to do some of the necessary editing. Please see this as a genuine attempt to improve the objectivity, relevance and reliability of the article. Designergene (talk) 10:47, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

I might start by removing the list of Foundational Figures. Rather than just a list of influencers, what is needed is a reliable history. Designergene (talk) 14:04, 1 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree, also I think the Issues and Ethics sections is another to be paid attention to, as this is very easy to fall into biased language about the subject and the section as of right now does carry a lot of opinionated statements. Kanethavong (talk) 21:19, 21 April 2022 (UTC)

Looking carefully again at the article, it does seem to need substantial editing, not just cutting. As well as style problems, several references are incorrect or confusingly jumbled. I propose to make a start on the History section and perhaps some reorganisation. Designergene (talk) 15:37, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Add dates to all names

This article does a good job covering the history and information about the academic discipline of design studies, but the Foundational figures section could be improved. A simple fix could be to add the birth dates and/or death dates of the people listed in having to do with design studies. Only some have dates next to their names and this article could be a little bit better if all the names had accurate information of how old these people are and if they are still alive or not. SkyradBear (talk) 05:20, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?

The article Design Studies gives a short description of what it is and what are the different characteristics it has. Then they start to talk about how history started and how has it developed throughout the years. It is also using a space to describe different concepts that make people understand better what is it that they are talking about. In the end, they talk about the various research methods that were used for the design Studies to be developed.

Throughout the entire article, they used a neutral voice and they don't give opinions about what they think about the topic. It also helps the readers create their own opinions about it and keep researching this subject. It is an objective article because it explains definitions and makes the Wikipedia page flow better for the readers~~~~. Rincons1 (talk) 17:53, 19 February 2024 (UTC)