Motivation in Design as a Driving Force for Defining Motives of Design - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 72

Chapter 6
Motivation in Design as a Driving
Force for Defining Motives of Design

Hernan Casakin and Shulamith Kreitler

Abstract The chapter introduces a new approach to social and personal motivation
for creativity grounded in the cognitive orientation (CO) theory, and discusses its
relation as a major drive to design motive in the pre-design and post-design phases.
The instrument for assessment of motivation for creativity—the cognitive orienta-
tion questionnaire of creativity (COQ-CR)—is described, and applied in a study
about social and personal motivations of creativity of design students in architec-
ture and engineering. The COQ-CR allows characterizing the structural and the-
matic composition of motivation for creativity across different design disciplines.
Implications for design practice and design education include operationalizing the
COQ-CR for understanding the underlying connections between motivation for
creativity and design motives of designers belonging to different disciplines.

Keywords Architecture • Behaviour • Cognitive orientation • Creative design
• Creativity • Engineering • Motivation • Motive • Post-design • Pre-design

6.1 Introduction: The Problem

In order to understand better the essence of design creativity, it is necessary to
explore the design phases that occur not only during the problem solving activity,
but also those that precede and follow it. These involve focusing on the pre-design
and post-design phases. While the pre-design phase is characterized mainly in terms
of explicit requirements and goals for the new products (e.g., Simon 1981 ), the post-
design phase can be distinguished by the experiences, feelings, and perceptions that
consumers or users express with regard to the design products (e.g., Taura 2014 ) .
The relations between these phases, however, are not always clear. Certain designs
are produced by considering given specifications or goals, but without taking into