Motivation in Design as a Driving Force for Defining Motives of Design - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 73

account feelings expressed by users with regard to such designs. In other cases,
designs are developed on the basis of the inspiration of the creative designer, while
disregarding the demands of the user. This problem becomes even more critical in
domains combining functional with artistic aspects, such as architecture, where
social considerations are not always regarded as important as the personal ones.
Thus, more research is needed to understand the relationship between the
pre-design and the post-design phases, wherein the notions of motive and motiva-
tion of the designer are expected to play an important role.
Nagai and Taura ( 2009 ) argued that motivation and motive are two powerful
components responsible for achieving the involvement of creative processes in
design. Whereas a motive can be defined as an aim for acting in a certain way,
motivation can be viewed as the engine necessary in order to activate, trigger, as
well as to maintain and bring to completion a design motive. In other words, design
motives are a necessary constituent of design motivation. For this reason, gaining
insight into the structure and dynamics characterizing the motivation of the
designer can contribute to understanding the underlying driving forces affecting
his or her motives of design, in particular those that are conducive to design
creativity. In this study we consider creativity as a cognitive act that integrates
both the social and personal motives. Consequently, we aim at dwelling on the
notion of design motivation, and its relation to design motive in the pre and post
design phases.
We based the study on the Cognitive Orientation (CO) theory (Kreitler and
Kreitler 1982 ; Kreitler 2004 ) , which defines motivation as a function of a set of
belief types, themes, and groupings identified as relevant for the development of
creativity. The CO Theory is one of the more developed and comprehensive
theories of motivation, including both a broad conceptual structure, and an assess-
ment method with a well-established empirical basis. The major theoretical
proposition is that behavior in all domains—including design and creativity—is a
function of motivation and performance, whereby motivation is conceptualized in
terms of beliefs. These are cognitive structures that represent particular themes,
which are relevant for the behavior in question and may be organized into main
groupings. In this study, we analyze design motivation by focusing on external
(social motivation), and internal (personal motivation) aspects, which complement
each other.
Understanding how these two kinds of motivation are assessed, is critical for
learning more about design motives. Thus, we aim at gaining a deeper insight into
the main aspects characterizing internal and external motivation for design crea-
tivity by analyzing two groups of students in the architecture and engineering
design domains. We explore whether each group may differ in the relative salience
of social and personal motivations, and we discuss how motivation may be
connected to design motives, and what may be the implications thereof for design
education. It is expected that the study will contribute to clarifying the relation
between design motivation, design motives, and their connections to the pre-design
and post-design phases.