User:Markbythepark/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Affective design

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
Affective design relates to my area of study which is human experience design. I am interested in how mental health can be improved through the use of digital systems that respond to the user's emotional or mental state. This is important for the future of mental healthcare since there are people who cannot afford a therapist, wish to augment therapy, or may be better served in their context by a product. My preliminary impression of the article is that it is a short overview and rather general.

Evaluate the article
Lead section
 * It doesn't seem to have very developed examples, achievements, criticisms, or to distinguish the term as worthy of its own field or sub-discipline. This might be because it is mostly engaged with by other fields. The lead is mostly well-done, providing an optimal level of detail for what follows.
 * However, the definition given in the lead is not substantiated by sources in the rest of the article, which    uses a broader definition that encompasses emotional design as elaborated     by Don Norman. Affective design in the lead section definition is implied to be a subcategory of emotional design, specifically related to user     interfaces that "process" and "adapt" or "respond to" user emotions, rather than simply being designed to elicit certain emotions.

Content


 * The content is relevant, but few of the sources are from the past five years. The article covers the founding of the concept in the 1980s until the late-2010s. Therefore, many of the ideas covered are speculative or vague, and do not discuss recent advances in AI and consumer wearables. The Aims section in particular does not have any sources after 2012. Goals may have changed or the term may have fallen out of favor. According to Google Trends, emotional design is a more popular term which is trending upwards in use since 2016, while affective design has stayed near 0.
 * It does not relate to any Wikipedia equity gaps
 * The Applications section primarily discusses how affect can be sensed by interactive systems to increase personalization of the experience. This section thus pivots back to the definition of affective design in the beginning, without considering the broader definition in the Background and Aims section.

Tone and Balance


 * The Aims section describes a radical goal for affective design, which is not substantiated by the rest of the article: "to create artefacts capable of eliciting the most pleasurable experience possible for users, across all of their senses."  This sentence is not cited and seems to require a citation.
 * Otherwise, content is stated in a neutral tone without favor for a certain agenda. The explicit study of Affective Design is not well documented online, so the identification of a fringe view is more in relation to more-studied design terms like ambient intelligence.

Sources and References


 * Facts are generally backed up by scholarly or professional sources.
 * The links work and are "current" in the sense of the last 25 years, but this may be    insufficient given the pace of change of the design field.
 * There doesn't appear to be any specific effort to include diverse authors, though many sources represent Asian cultures.

Organization and writing quality


 * The article is free of major spelling or grammar errors, and is concise, clear, and easy to read.
 * The sections are logical

Images and Media


 * There is a helpful image in the article, but it is not referenced in the article and the caption is not detailed.

Talk page discussion


 * There's not much activity, but it is noted that article was the subject of a WikiEDU assignment in 2023, hence recent updates.

Overall impressions


 * Affective design does not seem to be a well developed area of study, but rather a term that describes a specific aspect of work done in related fields, especially affective computing. The term doesn't seem to have much scholarship or professional use, so the article seems to highlight examples that do not reference affective design but incorporate its aims and methods.
 * This page seems surprisingly inactive for a topic that is key to a highly active industry, however it seems that the term has fallen out of use, compared to the broader term    "emotional design," and even broader term "empathic design."
 * The article provides a useful and brief survey of the intersection of technology and designs that respond to emotion. It contains links to more developed articles to help a reader get situated, but is missing a link to emotional design.
 * The article can be greatly improved by clarifying the term affective design and its connection to emotional design. The Background and Aims sections might need to be    re-written to reflect the narrower meaning of affective design, or the Applications section would need to be expanded to reflect the broader meaning. Moreover, some further development or exploration of the examples, achievements, or criticisms of affective design would be helpful to better situate the reader. It seems odd that something so seemingly     broad and pervasive would have very narrow examples in the applications section. Moreover, there's no mention of mental health.