On the use of design patterns in collaborative design processes

Even if the usefulness of a knowledge repository represented as a collection of design patterns is largely recognized in the literature, little work has been done in investigating and measuring the impact such a collection would have on collaborative design processes involving designers. The paper describes the results of a case study designed to bring some insight into the matter. 18 design workshops were conducted with 18 teams of undergraduate students in Computer Science. Making use of a collection of design patterns for the design of synchronous applications, they were asked to design the GUI and the interaction process of applications which support synchronous collaboration in activities such as drawing, text editing, game solving, and searching. To answer the questions addressed by the case study, the results of the workshops were triangulated from: i) audio recordings of the conversations of each team, ii) notes taken on the participants interactions by a facilitator present during the workshops, and iii) feedback provided by each participant through a questionnaire, at the end of each workshop.