Motivation in Design as a Driving Force for Defining Motives of Design - Principia Designae: Pre-Design, Design, and Post-Design - page 81

being guided by intuition and emotions, and emphasizing the self over the external
environment and the others. Accordingly, all of these themes are concerned
with personal motivations of the designer. On the contrary, the profile for the
engineering group was defined by openness to the environment, manifested in a
specific interest to learn and absorb from it as much as possible, even under
conditions in which the environment provides few stimuli. In addition, they had
social and political concerns, as well as a tendency to demand from themselves, and
strive for perfection even at the cost of distancing from the others. Most the themes
reflected an environmental and social concern.
6.5 Discussing Motivation and Motive in Creative Design
Analysing the thematic structure of motivation for creativity at different levels of
complexity by means of the COQ-CR, allow identifying the more general differ-
ences between groups of designers belonging to different disciplines, as well as
differences between individuals that may belong to a same design field but may
have dissimilar motivational tendencies.
Applying the COQ-CR for understanding the internal/personal, and external/
social motivations of designers from different disciplines can contribute to gaining
a deeper insight into the drive leading to their design motives, and the role that these
play in the pre-design and post-design phases. As a result, it may be possible to
strengthen links between these design phases, and reduce potential mismatches
between the aims of the designer and the needs of the user. By knowing what might
be the internal and external motivations of a designer according to his or her
professional background and individual differences, it would be possible to learn
whether these are balanced, or unbalanced due to the dominance of one or another
aspect over the other. For example, when the internal motivations are stronger than
the external ones, the link established between external motivations and social
motives might be weak or disregarded. In this case, it would be possible to make
designers more conscious of specific external motivations related for example to the
needs of the users with regard to a specific design, or to the environment itself.
Consequently, it may be necessary to make designers aware of how users interact
with their designs, and what are their resulting experiences, wishes, perceptions and
aspirations. Whereas social motives acquire relevance mainly in the post-design
phase, gaining insight into them can have a powerful effect not only in the external
motivations of the designer, but also the internal ones. Since motivations are active
mostly in the pre-design phase, they can affect the formation of personal motives
related to the definition of design needs and requirements for future designs. In
other cases in which design situations are totally new and social needs are unknown,
there could be a missing connection between the existing designs and the designer's
motives for a new design (Nagai and Taura 2009 ) . Therefore, it might be critical in
the pre-design phase to help designers clarify what are the internal motivations
influencing their personal aims for design action.