Feedback in concept development: Comparing design disciplines

•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.

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.