Design Pattern Language Research Articles

A Design Pattern Language for Effective Professional Development Programs for Clinicians: A Decade of Design-based Research

Continuing professional development (CPD) for clinicians is necessary for individual health professionals to maintain their professional standards and for the community, who rely on their services for the delivery of evidence-based, cost-effective health services. In the late 1990s, three driving forces for using design-based research in CPD appeared. First, meta-analysis of research evidence indicated that most educational interventions were ineffective in improving clinician performance or changing practice. Secondly, the market requirements of the health industry (i.e. large scale, cost-effective programs, across a wide variety of topics and clinician groups) favoured reproducible designs over ad hoc solutions. Thirdly, emergent internet technologies were attractive candidate solutions, but increased risk compared to face to face CPD. Over ten years of design-based research, the authors have designed, developed, delivered and studied the results of over 200 professional development programs, mostly e-learning. Approximately 12,000 health professionals each year engage. Because the authors, as a multidisciplinary design and delivery team, have had full cycle responsibility, they have had a living laboratory in which to conduct design-based research. Three major design improvement cycles have been completed. Both the design-based research process and the resultant successful design framework will be presented. The framework covers the evidence base, design principles, design patterns and pattern language for designing and implementing professional development, in both online and face to face modes.

Building an interaction design pattern language: A case study

Interaction design patterns are a proven way to communicate good design. However, current pattern collections are not sufficiently powerful and generative to be used as a guide for designing an entire application such as those used in complex business environments. This study shows how we built and validated interaction design patterns that serve as the specification for the redesign of an application. Additionally, they were integrated into a pattern language, as a ruleset for human–computer interaction (HCI) non-professionals to continue development of the application. We demonstrate how individual phases in the redesign of an application can be matched with the process of creating an interaction design pattern language. To facilitate the writing of individual interaction design patterns as well as the development of the pattern language as a whole, a combination of user interviews, controlled experiments and analytical methods has been applied successfully.

Towards a Pattern Language for the Design of Collaborative Interactive Systems

Nowadays, the design of interactive systems addresses diverse communities of end users, each belonging to a certain culture, having a role in the context/domain and using a specific digital platform. More than often, they come together and collaborate in performing their work tasks and need to be supported by virtual interactive systems. This brings a set of challenges and design problems to be faced by interaction designers focused on the design of collaborative interactive systems. The present paper focuses on one approach to overcome these challenges – by making available the knowledge and wisdom within a team of designers to each and every designer in the team by the definition of pattern languages, organized as sets of multimedia, multimodal documents accessible and manageable in the Web. A design pattern language comprises a set of inter-related design patterns able to address interaction design problems and to allow the accumulation and use of knowledge within a team of designers. This paper identifies and describes a set of design patterns addressing the design of collaborative interactive systems together with the possible relationships among them and the operations made available to designers for managing and using the patterns.

The role of design-principles in designing courses that promote collaborative learning in higher-education

Design-patterns and design-principles represent two approaches, which elicit design knowledge from successful learning environments and formulate it as design guidelines. The two approaches are fairly similar in their strategies, but differ in their research origins. This study stems from the design-principles approach, and explores how learning is affected by curriculum-materials designed according to two main design-principles: (a) engage learners in peer instruction, and (b) reuse student artifacts as resource for further learning. These principles were employed in three higher-education courses and examined with 385 students. Data analysis was conducted in two trajectories: In the “bird’s eye view” trajectory we used a “feature” unit of analysis to illustrate how learning was supported by features designed according to the two design-principles in each of the courses. In the “design-based research” trajectory we focused on one feature, a web-based Jigsaw activity, in a philosophy of education course, and demonstrated how it was refined via three design iterations. Students were required to specialize in one of three philosophical perspectives, share knowledge with peers who specialized in other perspectives, and reuse the shared knowledge in new contexts. Outcomes indicated that the design in the first iteration did not sufficiently support student ability to apply the shared knowledge. Two additional design-principles were employed in the next iterations: (c) provide knowledge representation and organization tools, and (d) employ multiple social-activity structures. The importance of combining several design-principles for designing curricular materials is discussed in terms of Alexander’s design-pattern language and his notion of referencing between design-patterns.

Extending the Contextual and Organizational Elements of Adaptive Structuration Theory in GSS Research

This paper addresses the variance in findings across Group Support Systems (GSS) studies by suggesting an expanded consideration of organizational and contextual elements in Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST). We propose a model of structuring tactics at three levels of abstraction: the meeting level, activity level, and real time intervention level. We illustrate this model with three specific purposeful structuring tactics — agendas, design patterns, and micro-processes —and present related propositions. In addition to reviewing the more familiar tactics of agenda setting and group facilitation, we illustrate an approach to creating GSS value based on invoking particular social structures. We accomplish this through consideration of a design pattern language for collaboration processes drawn from the Collaboration Engineering literature. We conclude by discussing how this model of structuring tactics advances theory and practice in the GSS domain.

Participatory design in open education: a workshop model for developing a pattern language

<div class="abstract_container"> Technologically enhanced learning environments raise complex challenges for their designers, developers and users. Design patterns and pattern languages have recently emerged as a potential framework for addressing some of these challenges. However, the uptake of design patterns has been slow outside of the computer science community. We argue that this is largely a consequence of a weak positioning of pattern languages, as a form of delivering expert knowledge to layperson, and suggest an alternative view: the development of a pattern language as a community endeavour. In terms of open education, the workshop model can be viewed as an open production process for developing educational resources, in our case design patterns. We propose a model of pattern elicitation workshops, in which collaborative development of a pattern language provides a framework for sharing design knowledge within interdisciplinary communities. This model was iteratively developed at five international conferences. It was then postulated as a design pattern itself, encompassing a series of practices and a set of supporting tools. We believe this model could be applied in a broad range of communities concerned with the development of open digital educational resources. </div> <p class="editors_container"><strong>Editor:</strong> Stephen Godwin (Open University, UK). <p class="reviewers_container"><strong>Reviewers:</strong> Stephen Carson (MIT, USA) and Alexandra Okada (Open University, UK). <p class="demo_container"><strong>Interactive elements:</strong> A video course demonstrating the workshop model is available at: <a href="http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/outcomes/videos/">http://lp.noe-kaleidoscope.org/outcomes/videos/</a>

A framework for efficient and rapid development of cross-platform audio applications

In this article, we present CLAM, a C++ software framework, that offers a complete development and research platform for the audio and music domain. It offers an abstract model for audio systems and includes a repository of processing algorithms and data types as well as all the necessary tools for audio and control input/output. The framework offers tools that enable the exploitation of all these features to easily build cross-platform applications or rapid prototypes for media processing algorithms and systems. Furthermore, included ready-to-use applications can be used for tasks such as audio analysis/synthesis, plug-in development, feature extraction or metadata annotation. CLAM represents a step forward over other similar existing environments in the multimedia domain. Nevertheless, it also shares models and constructs with many of those. These commonalities are expressed in the form of a metamodel for multimedia processing systems and a design pattern language.

Using pattern languages to mediate theory–praxis conversations in design for networked learning

Educational design for networked learning is becoming more complex but also more inclusive, with teachers and learners playing more active roles in the design of tasks and of the learning environment. This paper connects emerging research on the use of design patterns and pattern languages with a conception of educational design as a conversation between theory and praxis. We illustrate the argument by drawing on recent empirical research and literature reviews from the field of networked learning.

ThinkLets: a collaboration engineering pattern language

Under the right circumstances, teams that use professional facilitators and Group Support Systems (GSS) experience significant gains in productivity and quality of work life. However, because of the expense, facilitators are not available to many teams that could benefit from their interventions. The emerging field of Collaboration Engineering aims to formulate an approach for designing high-value recurring collaboration processes that capture the best practices of master facilitators and packaging the processes in a fashion that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without the ongoing intervention of professional facilitators. Towards that end, Collaboration Engineering researchers have developed thinkLets, an Alexandrian design pattern language. A thinkLet is a named, packaged facilitation technique, captured as a pattern that collaboration engineers can incorporate into process designs. These patterns can be instantiated at design time in such a way that a practitioner can use them to recreate a predictable pattern of collaboration. This paper articulates the details of thinkLet design patterns and explains the utility that facilitators, collaboration engineers, researchers and practitioners are deriving from thinkLets in the field. It examines the parallels and differences among the goals and structures of the thinkLets pattern language, Alexander's architectural patterns and software design patterns.

Using patterns to improve our architectural vision

Pattern languages can play an important role in furthering the use of architecture and objects in software design, but first we must understand what these terms mean. The authors use the work of Christopher Alexander (1975, 1979, 1981, 1985) to illuminate the problems and shed light on future directions in our use of pattern languages in design.