Pattern Design

Now we're getting somewhere. After all, the title of the URECA project was design for a mobile digital lifestyle. Not to say that what went before wasn't important, it served to highlight the fact that a proper pattern design is probably essential if MDS is to take off.

What exactly is pattern design then?
Having no idea, my only resource was the IBM red book and probably google. Fortunately, the IBM red book was pretty enlightening despite being extremely long. That coupled with the pattern language questionnaire has enable me to interpret pattern language design as being such, at least for the consumer point of view:

Pattern Language Design refers to a way of designing such that clearly recognisable symbols which are interpreted intuitively are built into the interface. For example, the "trash" icon is interpreted as deletion of an item.

So, how exactly do we create a properly designed pattern language?
And, will such a pattern language be useful in the business sense?
Those will be the focus of my next few posts...