Feedback systems in the design and development process

Feedback is essential in the design and development process, occurring in the generation of new designs, in the adaptation of development projects to emerging information, and in coordination and collaboration of project participants—among many other aspects. Feedback also contributes to development project complexity and may cause resistance to desirable changes. But despite the importance of feedback in the design and development process (DDP), relatively few publications have examined this topic in an integrated way. This article makes two contributions towards addressing the gap. First, a conceptual framework is developed to organise perspectives on feedback in the DDP literature. The framework shows how feedback occurs at different levels of the design and development process and how it affects important DDP behaviours, namely goal-seeking, learning and emergence. Second, a system-theoretic model of feedback situations in the design and development process is introduced to synthesise key ideas. We provide concrete examples to show how this new model can be used to frame DDP situations and draw out feedback-related insight.