There are quite a few studies and papers on the use of design patterns in practice, but most of the ones I'm aware of covering software design. There are e.g. always a couple of papers in the category "Applying patterns" at the European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (www.europlop.org).

But, as was discussed during the 22nd PLoP conference just a couple of days ago, there is indeed not enough research on the evidence and value of patterns. I'm myself working in that area (as you know), especially looking at the value of design patterns in education.

A few comments: people who question the value of patterns and pattern languages have imho. not fully understood them. Design patterns are simply there and we all apply them daily, if we like it or not. But it is one thing to recognize this and another one to find and describe these patterns and pattern languages in a good way. The pattern community (around the various xPLoP conference, see www.hillside.net/conferences for an overview) works on this for more than 20 years now and we established a (still not perfect) way of increasing the quality of the patterns. But many patterns are published independent of the pattern community and therefore were not subject to the feedback provided there. And in my opinion it seems that in many cases the understanding of patterns was different from what they really are. For this reason, many published patterns are of less quality, simply incorrect or too trivial, and this is where I'm completely with the critics that these pattern description do not add much (especially compared to standard best practices etc.). So one of the important questions I think is more on how to improve the mining and description of the patterns AND to make them available to a broader audience in a valuable way. This is actually one of the topics I (and many others in the pattern community) are working on right now. I'm happy to discuss this with you in more detail (you know where to find me ;-) ).

Regards,

Christian

Hi Christian,

Thanks for your answer. Examples from software design could be start, so if you have some refs that would be great.

It is quite a strong cognitive psychological claim you make: “patterns are simply there and that we all apply them”. I have seen no evidence so far that designers’ background knowledge is indeed encoded in something like patterns (do they have a similar status like schemas and scripts?) or studies that show what role these ‘implicit’ patterns may play alongside other types of design knowledge.

So one step to take is to see what people are actually doing with explicit pattern descriptions, as they are being engineered in the patterns community. Although I appreciate the efforts of the patterns community to improve the literary form of patterns, my question does not is not about the ideal form of the patterns (be it most real, or most useful) but the actual concrete uses of this in current design practices.

To make my point clearer I could draw the parallel with Persona’s. These have been described by Cooper in “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” and “About Face” and many efforts have gone into deciding how persona’s OUGHT to be constructed, used etc. Studies about how personas ARE used, are much more recent and for my current project much more interesting.

One example is the recent study by Erin Freiss (Friess, Erin. "Personas and decision making in the design process: an ethnographic case study." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2012.

I am looking for similar literature about patterns.

I absolutely agree that there is more research needed on the actual use of patterns and pattern languages. BTW: we as pattern community do not only work on improving the literary form of patterns, but mainly the content of the patterns themselves (where the form of presentation is helping with communicating the actual content of the pattern). Right now I'm working (together with students of mine) on a pattern repository (fro educational patterns) that will be used for communicating the patterns to colleagues, but also to gather information on how the patterns are used and experienced. But this is still at the beginning (similar efforts are done by other people, e.g. Inventado and Scupelli of Carnegie Mellon or by Mary Shaw for collecting SE research patterns, we shared a few ideas at the last PLoP conference and will likely work together on parts of the repository).

I know that it is a strong claim to say that the patterns are simply there, but I strongly believe in this. We all know that good designer make good designs, and what makes them different from other designers is (1) experience and (2) implicit tacit knowledge based on this experience. What patterns offer is a good way to identify and describe this tacit knowledge. The format helps to identify the core aspects of the design solution that makes it work and also the context in which it works, what the consequences of applying the solution are, and also how this pattern relates to other patterns (the language aspect).

A good read is the PhD thesis of Christian Kohls, where he discusses the theoretical aspects of design patterns and their relations to other theories such as schema's etc. It can be downloaded here: http://d-nb.info/1052582826/34

A couple of papers which are covering the aspect of showing the value/evidence of software design patterns (there are more, but these are a few I'm aware of right now):

Nijboer, G, Kabbedijk, J, and Jansen, S. The Adoption of Software Patterns in the Dutch Software Industry. Preprints of the 17th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs conference, EuroPLoP’12, (2012).

Walter F. Tichy, The Evidence for Design Patterns in Making Software--What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, Andy Oram and Greg Wilson (Ed.), O'Reilly, 2011.

Hills, M., Klint, P., and Vinju, J.J. A Case of Visitor versus Interpreter Pattern. Proceedings of the 49th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components and Patterns, (2011).

One paper that addresses the application of student collaboration patterns in a software engineering project is this:

Köppe, C., van Eekelen, M., Hoppenbrouwers, S., (2015). Improving Student Group Work with Collaboration Patterns: A Case Study. Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE'15, Florence, Italy (download link attached)

http://koeppe.nl/publications/koppe_preprint_ICSE2015.pdf

Well for your comparison to personas: I wrote the first academic paper on personas and it was an ethnographic account of how they were used in interaction design practice (Blomquist & Arvola, 2002). So it was not only later. 

Anyhow, that was sort of a side point. I think that much of the value of patterns is in using them in education. i use for example Tidwells book and van Welies web site for that purpose. When you have internalized them you tend to apply them without too much conscious effort, and sometimes without being aware of it. In my own work on patterns in interaction design, I have used patterns as a way of reporting research results and academic knowledge (Arvola, 2005; 2006).

In software engineering, patterns are different from the Alexandrian kind of patterns I have made, and they seem to work better as an approach to knowledge management in a development organisation (in comparison to interaction design and UX). But that is just my thinking as an outsider to software engineering.

Pan and Stolterman (2013) has made an interview study with HCI researchers whom have worked with patterns. But I would very much welcome a study that looked att interaction design patterns in practice. I would probably adopt an action research or autoetnographic approach to such a study rather than an ethnographic approach, since I think there are very few (if any) design consultancy or IxD/UX-design team at product companies using an explicit pattern approach in practice. 

References

Arvola, M. (2005). Shades of Use: The Dynamics of Interaction Design for Sociable Use. Linköping Studies in Science and Technology Dissertation No. 900. Linköping, Sweden: Linköpings universitet. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-5019 

Arvola, M. (2006). Interaction design patterns for computers in sociable use. International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 25 (2/3), 128-139. http://www.ida.liu.se/~matar63/IJCATarvola.pdf

Blomquist, Å., & Arvola, M. (2002). Personas in action: Ethnography in an interaction Design Team. In Proceedings of NordiCHI 2002: Tradition and trancendence, pp. 197-200. October 19–23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark. New York, NY: ACM Press. http://www.ida.liu.se/~matar63/NordiCHI02blomquist-web.pdf 

Pan, Y. & Stolterman, E. (2013). Pattern Language and HCI: Expectations and Experiences. In CHI 2013 alt.chi, Proc. of CHI’2013. New York, NY: ACM Press. http://altchi.org/2013/submissions/submission_panyuepl_0.pdf

This isn interesting work about the use of patterns for knowldege representation

Vujasinovic, Marko*; | Ivezic, Nenad | Kulvatunyou, Boonserm, A survey and classification of principles for domain-specific ontology design patterns development, Journal: Applied Ontology, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 41-69, 2015, http://www.iospress.nl/journal/applied-ontology/

Christian, Mattias, Emilio. Thanks for these resources. 

Mattias: sorry for missing out on your persona paper and thanks for correcting this. I saw you are refering to ‘The Inmates..’ when discussing the introduction of the persona method. However when reading 'The Inmates…' I was wondering whether personas weren’t featured in the first version of ‘About Face’, which predates ‘The Inmates…’. Do you happen to know this (nerdy fact)?

Responding to your comment that explicit IxD patterns are used in few design consultancy firms: can you think of a reason why this could be the case?

Nope, there is nothing on personas in the first edition of About Face (that I could find this morning at least).

Patterns may very well be implicitly used, and there might be a copy of Tidwells book in the bookshelf at many consultancies. But they don't have any use of it as a knowledge management tool, since they jump from project to project, and they are quite different. So it will not lead to any pattern language; just scattered patterns. 

There are some interesting discussions in the pattern community between the difference of pattern languages and project languages. The latter ones are the part of the pattern language that works together for a specific project (as also initially was intended by Christopher Alexander). Also their implementations and the way they work together are specific for this one project.

One paper touching this topic is published in the PLoP'13 proceedings: http://www.hillside.net/plop/2013/papers/proceedings/papers/motohashi.pdf