Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing

James A. Landay, Gaetano Borriello, “Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing,” Computer, vol. 36, no. 8, pp. 93-95, Aug., 2003.

Design patterns offer a solution to the difficult problem of reusing prior reusing prior design knowledge. The author propose to introduce patterns in ubicomp to offer a way to communicate solutions to design problems. Design patterns emerged from the work of Christopher Alexander in the 70s (A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction. Alexander proposed for example the Beer Hall pattern considering the following problem: “Where can people sing, and drink, and shout and drink, and let go of their sorrows?” The resolution would be:

Somewhere in a community at least one big place where a few hundred people can gather, with beer and wine, music, and perhaps a half-dozen activities, so that people are continuously cris-crossing from one to another.

Some efforts in documenting lessons already learned in ubicop have taken place in Chart of Patterns in Ubiquitous and Context Computing and evaluation reported in the paper:

Eric Chung, Jason I. Hong, James Lin, Madhu K. Prabaker, James A. Landay, and Alan L. Liu. Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing. In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (DIS2004), 2004.

Relation to my thesis: The “gang of four” made a impact on software engineering by formalizing “best practices”. Ubicomp might need such a milestone and “mature” from implication for design to design patterns. It related to Everyware‘s Thesis 57 refering that the proper ubicomp design convention do not exsist yet:

As designers, we simply don’t yet know how to discuss these issues, not with each other, not with our clients, and especially not with the people using the things we build.

An output of my thesis could land in the ubicomp design patterns field.