Creative Architectural Design Boosted by ITC Enhanced Incubator - How to facilitate tighter integrated collaboration to boost the emergence and diffusion of creativity.

Creativity is a phenomenon that is observed in many fields of human activity. It occurs unexpectedly but at the same time more frequently in particular historical and environmental conditions characterized by the proximity (of course, not only physical) among operators in a given discipline, the beginning of a favourable economic cycle and emulation among themselves: we have defined these as ‘incubator’ conditions. On the other hand, creativity in architecture presents quite specific features linked to the construction of spaces by means of elements that are “other”: material ones. The problems arise out of the reciprocal relations – interfaces – between heterogeneous elements: interfaces between building elements, between the operators’ cultures, between figurative elements, between ‘form’ and ‘existing buildings’ in the prevailing culture. Compared with the other arts, architecture presents hugely dilated appropriate collective design aspects (that are related to the fact of being prefigured in a team possessing technical skills). Creativity is capable of achieving a synthesis between opposing needs, proceeding beyond them at the highest level. Creativity in such an environment also, if not above all, means creativity of the team(s) and the project. we believe that the collaborative design paradigm is the most appropriate for boosting, disseminating and assessing the creative ideas arising in the course of design by the operators and users involved. However, we declare with equal clarity that the current tools provided by ICT are designed for other tasks. It is therefore necessary to develop an overall model, or MetaSystem, that boosts to a maximum collaboration among operators both through the exchange of distributed knowledge relevant to the various operators engaged in the design and building process.