Putting It All Together: Towards a Pattern Language for Interaction Design Reports

Abstract

Pattern languages are representations that have been used in architecture and urban design for about twenty years. They focus on the interaction between physical form and social behaviour, and express design solutions in an understandable and generalizable form. But pattern languages are not simply set of patterns intended to be universally applied, instead, they are actually meta-languages which, when used in a particular situations, generate situated design languages. This report describes a CHI 97 workshop which explored the utility of pattern languages for interaction design. We discuss the workshop's rationale, the structure and process of the workshop, and some of the workshop's results. In particular, we describe some patterns developed as part of the workshop, and our consequent reflections on the use of patterns and pattern languages as lingua franca for interaction design. This report concludes with a bibliography on pattern languages and related matters that spans architecture, software design, and organizational design