I have been fascinated by the notion and culture of "design patterns" of late. For those of you late to the game like me design patterns is the notion of capturing and communicating contextually relevant rules-of-thumb about a field of knowledge.

Rather than a set of abstract principles, best practices, or things like style guides...the key difference in the approach is that a design pattern is a typical solution to a specific, recurring problem.

It also seems to me that it is a great way to capture bodies of knowledge that are infused with a decent degree of subjectivity and complexity. It is also theorized that a bunch of patterns might fit together not just as a set of data but make up the units of a language for communicating a kind of design thinking.

Here is some wiki knowledge: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogical_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_design_pattern

Now is turns out that this approach was famously fleshed out in architecture by fellow named Christopher Alexander in a series of books that attempt to capture a humanist approach to building, that can be applied by even a novice. Alexander seems to have a bit of a cult following. The design pattern approach apparently set off a big movement in computer science, user experience design, game design, and even education.

There is also a fun notion of the anti-pattern, which is what not to do.

I came to this originally when I was talking to a user-experience designer earlier this year and he made an offhanded comment about UX patterns...I was curious about how he seemed to think you could capture the rather subjective issues we were discussing but I forgot about it until I was recently reading The Art of Game Design (a good one) and the author mentioned it and so I stumbled into a rather interesting world.

It seems like it is one of those internet conversations that has seen a flurry of activity but reached a dead end and has faded away. Particularly in the early 00's it seemed there was a bunch of discussion on the UX side but then it stops...see this discussion as a prime example: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?347

What seems to be happening is that the language and the logic is easier to talk about than the subjective intangibles which then is smothering the fundamental insight. This is a typical anti-pattern I think best known as "There is nothing less funny than talking about comedy." In the blog discussion linked about you see that much of the debate is supposedly about what patterns are useful for and such but the currency of the debate is really about what makes up a good pattern and what categories make the best template for writing them.

An interested bit of internet culture aside the thing that intrigues me is the capacity for this mode of documentation to capture elusive things like performance and live experience design best practices.

On the art side for instance, performance art struggles as a discipline because it doesn't have a clear body of practice yet...it is more of a interdisciplinary hodgepodge which is interesting from an innovation perspective but less so from a credibility standpoint. How do you teach something for instance that has no fundamental set of skills?

On the live experience side of things, I have been struggling to find a way to capture this as a body of knowledge that is broad enough to approach any kind of live event...from a birthday party, to a corporate conference, to a day at the park. Seems like a series of live event patterns might be an interesting approach.