Authentic Video Feedback for Product Design Students

Since the COVID-19 pandemic and due to living in a digital environment, video feedback has become more prominent in higher education. However, it has not been as well adopted on product design courses due to the subjective nature of creative disciplines, and the unique challenges this constitutes in making it an authentic experience for students. This paper takes an influential framework for creating authentic feedback experiences and uses it to design a video feedback exercise for product design students. The framework presents five criteria relating to Realism, Cognitive Challenge, Affective Challenge, Evaluative Judgment, and Enacting feedback. From each of these criteria, the authors derive a set of propositions for video feedback and translate them into design features including: the use of discursive language, proportionate discussion to assessment criteria, the use of sensitive and empathic language, making visual reference to student work onscreen, and explanations of constructive actions. The video feedback exercise was then delivered to a cohort of twenty-eight, final year, undergraduate product design students. Both quantitative and qualitative datasets were collected through Likert scale and freetext questions in a survey completed by all twenty-eight, students and semi-structured interviews with five students. A statistical and thematic analysis developed an understanding of the video feedback exercise as an authentic feedback experience, highlighting some of its strengths and limitations as a teaching tool. The paper concludes with several recommendations to improve and develop the design of the video feedback exercise.