What’s in a Pattern: A Vocabulary to Articulate Group Routines and Practices

When people come together as part of a community, oriented towards a collective activity, over an extended period of time, they develop and maintain different routines for the way they are organized, delegate, and carry out their activities. These routines involve a mixture of artifacts and technologies, and are shaped by key common dimensions such as how regulated an activity is, or whether it must follow a particular order. The routines also becomes inherited by new members of the community who use and develop them in their activity. We propose that similar routines, taking place across different communities, with their technologies and dimensions can be expressed and understood as a pattern. We present four patterns as examples that highlight the ways in which communities carry out routines related to organizing and engaging in their joint activity and discuss how such ways of addressing patterns may support the design of new community technologies.