Friends,
Yesterday, Keith Russell posted a help note on the value of editing prior posts to preserve relevant material and cut the rest. Within a couple of hours, someone posted a new and relevant research request — while copying the full content of a prior thread under the old header with 9 footers reminding us that this is the PhD-Design list. Then a professor replied to this single request with a useful five-line reply. But these five useful lines were made less helpful to the rest of us by several hundred lines and nearly 4,500 words of irrelevant earlier material, including 10 (ten!) footers. This post also warned us in two languages about the legal consequences of reading all of these old messages if they weren't meant for us.
I request that you trim the redundant tails on earlier posts. The list will be far more readable without multiple footers and repeat sigs from people other than the author of the present post.
I request that you delete legal boilerplate warning us not to read confidential material. When you write to the PhD-Design list, you are writing to nearly 2,700 people. This is not confidential note. Your university does not need to warn all 2,700 of us that we risk legal consequences if we read what a professor sent to all of us. We certainly do not need to read this warning twice. Internationalisation does not mean translating an irrelevant warning into two languages.
Discussion lists and research lists such as PhD-Design are a regular part of any research community today. In many fields, universities now teach doctoral students how to use Listserv software, how to compose a note or a research request, and how to post it. This should be part of the research training program.
We expect professors to master these skills. We should set the standard in research communication for our students.
I expect designers with responsibility for products, services, and information to do at least as well as anthropologists, literature professors, librarians, informatics experts, physicists, and theologians. I browse lists across several fields for different reasons. So far, it seems that the other fields are winning the race for clear, well structured communication.
Keith explained yesterday how to organise a careful post. List members have been making similar requests for fifteen years.
Theologians discuss medieval manuscripts in clean, well structured list communication. Why can’t we?
Archeologists deal with Akkadian inscriptions from the reign of Manishtushu in clear, uncluttered email posts. Why can’t we?
Physicists and mathematicians manage this all the time. Can’t designers do as well?
My two cents.
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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