Towards a framework to store and retrieve memories for creative architectural projects Maria Rosaria STUFANO MELONE a,1 , Stefano BORGO b , Roberta FERRARIO b and Claudio MASOLO b a DICATECH, Politecnico di Bari, Italia b Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italia Abstract. Creative aspects of architectural and design thinking have been studied in recent research in connection to concepts of innovation and originality. In ar- chitecture 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 mecha- nisms 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. Keywords. Architecture, Analogy, Metaphor, Creativity, Annotation, Pattern 1. Introduction It is a widespread conviction that architects are endowed with the ability to imagine and to create; sometimes this ability is called fantasy, sometimes dream [1]. Hofstadter defines creativity (or the essence of creativity, or all-round creativity) as having a marked intuition for what is interesting, in using it recursively, applying it to the meta-level and modifying it accordingly [2]. Creativity has also been defined as the ability to restructure old ideas to produce new inventions [3] and to apply original thinking [4,5]. As design is a complex and weakly structured activity, the exploration of unfamiliar and unconventional design solutions requires creative skills [5,6,7,8]. Creative aspects of architectural and design thinking have been studied also in recent research in neuroscience, where creativity is often linked to the 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 [9] and mental images as well [10]. Architects in their writings express the awareness of how the 1 Corresponding Author: Maria Rosaria Stufano Melone, Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italia; E-mail: rossellaok@gmail.com. Copyright c  2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).