On the Ontological Status of Design Objects

In the design process, architects tend to choose and arrange together primitive geometrical elements according to their own cognitive environment (as reflected by culture and education), taking into account as well the broader social environment from which planning requests emerge. Therefore, each of such elements plays a very specific role in the global system, resulting from a strong intentional choice. Design creativity emerges exactly from such strong intentional choices. During their activities, architects tend to talk of these design elements using terms that reflect the role they have in the system, talking of them as "real entities" even if they don't exist (yet) in the real world, and are just on paper or even only in the architect's mind. In this paper we shall discuss the ontological nature of design elements and related notions, distinguishing among: (i) design elements, (ii) design components, (iii) physical system components, (iv) conventional system components.