Towards a framework to store and retrieve memories for creative architectural projects

Creative aspects of architectural and design thinking have been studied in recent research in connection to concepts of innovation and originality. In architecture novelty is intended as a “major criterion of creativity” and is related in the visual arts to the manipulation and transformation of images. Memories have a fundamental role in the implementation of creative and innovative architectural projects. We hypothesize that this creative process is strongly based on mechanisms that resemble metaphorical thinking on memories and propose an approach, whose first elements are outlined in this paper, to help architects to retrieve and re-contextualize their memories when captured via external supports, like photos and sketches, by mimicking the way metaphors are resolved in cognitive science.