“Divide et Impera” to dramatically and consciously simplify design. The mental/instance path - How reasoning among spaces, components and goals

In our times, in a complex and universal village where problems are intertwined and pervasive beyond our imagination, we need new approaches to deal with them - appropriately. In a previous work we highlighted the importance to reason ontologies: a 'world' f.i. a building - as a mental image - is not a Linnaeus's classification (structured set of entities) but a system (goals oriented set of classes) able to reasoning upon selectively chosen entities belonging to different Realms (ontology universes) (Fioravanti et al., 2011a). The general aim of our research- to be an effective aid to design - is to simulate wo/man as designer and user of designed spaces, hence how mental skill can be computably included in new tools able to tackle these problems. This paper is focused on the first role: how actor-designers approach design problems and how the inference mechanism can help them and affect the design process. A 'Building Object' - the dual system of Spaces and Technology elements - is inferred in several ways according to different goals and the inference mechanism can, simulating human mental shortcuts, optimize thinking.