Feedback in concept development: Comparing design disciplines

Abstract

Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool to promote student design progress, yet little research has focused on what instructor feedback looks like, especially across design disciplines. In this paper, we analyzed feedback provided in dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering to explore variation in feedback type across disciplines as well as how feedback type encouraged students to take convergent or divergent paths in their design processes. Many common feedback types were observed across the three disciplines, regardless of variance in context and expectations, as well as some notable distinctions. With regards to feedback directing convergent and divergent thinking, feedback suggesting convergent pathways was more prominent across all three disciplines. Keywords: design education, design feedback, design processes, conceptual design HIGHLIGHTS• Feedback session settings, approaches and discussions varied by disciplines.• Convergent and divergent feedback were used across diverse design disciplines.• Convergent-directing feedback was more evident across disciplines.Innovative solutions are often traced to ideation, where diverse creative ideas are initiated and developed (Brophy, 2001;Liu, Bligh, & Chakrabarti, 2003). Design processes facilitate this route to bringing ideas to innovative outcomes (Ottosson, 2001;Soosay & Hyland, 2004), and this path toward innovation hinges on successful concept generation, defined as the creation of multiple and diverse concepts (Akin & Lin, 1995;Atman, Chimka, Bursic, & Nachtman, 1999;Liu et al., 2003;Daly, Yilmaz, Christian, Seifert, & Gonzalez, 2012). Students often engage in design ideation during project-based courses such as cornerstone and capstone engineering design courses and domain specific and interdisciplinary studio courses (Dym & Little, 2004;Oh, Ishizaki, Gross, & Do, 2012;Sagun, Demirkan, & Goktepe, 2001;Uluoglu, 2000). Project-based courses often allow for more freedom in timing and pathways, but instructors must make sure students stay on track. Instructor success relies, in part, on the ability to provide guidance and feedback on students' design paths and processes, allowing them to explore on their own, but facilitating a structure where the students can learn strategies to fully explore and define problems, engage in divergent processes by generating a wide range of solutions and converge on and verify the most promising outcomes.In our work, we investigated instructor feedback in dance choreography, industrial design, and mechanical engineering to compare instructors' approaches to guiding students' work. While the content of the design projects was unique to the disciplines, students engaged in design thinking,

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“…These two disciplines have different histories and practices, with engineering emerging from war-and infrastructure-building, and design coming from science-based and arts-based traditions (Lande & Oplinger, 2014). Though both fields use design thinking and activities, engineering often emphasizes specialized roles and mathematical thinking (Lande & Oplinger, 2014) while design has more consideration of the holistic relationship between functional, emotional, and aesthetic aspects of a design (Yilmaz & Daly, 2016).…”

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