Organization, access and sharing of knowledge in architectural design

The architectural project, since its conceiving, constitutes a great syntheses effort,where different knowledge fields are called to simultaneously influence the design. Information gathering represents therefore a crucial phase of thewhole design process.The competences that constitute the knowledge corpus of Architectural design are a mix of framed experiences, values, technical information and expert insights. Moreover they originate daily and are applied, during designing, teaching and learning. Rarely this mix of experiences is used as it would be necessary in order to exploit its full potential in terms of quality of the design. One of the most critical barriers to the exploitation of these potentialities is the limits hindering access to the right knowledge at the right time. The practice of communities - that generate the "daily knowledge" - are, in the best case, recorded and stored in isolated e-learning systems. Consequently accessing the right information at the right time during a design session, classroom teaching, personal learning, is difficult, even in the today digital era. The limits to accessing architecture knowledge are much more related to representational and cultural differences than to pure physical access, nowadays supported by the Internet.