Development and Evaluation of Emerging Design Patterns for Ubiquitous Computing

Design patterns are a format for capturing and sharing design knowledge. In this paper, we look at a new domain for design patterns, namely ubiquitous computing. The overall goal of this work is to aid practice by speeding up the diffusion of new interaction techniques and evaluation results from researchers, presenting the information in a form more usable to practicing designers. Towards this end, we have developed an initial and emerging pattern language for ubiquitous computing, consisting of 45 pre-patterns describing application genres, physical-virtual spaces, interaction and systems techniques for managing privacy, and techniques for fluid interactions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our pre-patterns with 16 pairs of designers in helping them design location-enhanced applications. We observed that our pre-patterns helped new and experienced designers unfamiliar with ubiquitous computing in generating and communicating ideas, and in avoiding design problems early in the design process.