Thinking about IxD patterns

Hav­ing just post­ed about a new pat­tern library; my mind has been occu­pied a bit by the role of pat­terns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD prob­lems, I tend to first try to tack­le the issue myself. Then, I usu­al­ly refer to some exam­ples and / or pat­terns, to see if I’ve missed any obvi­ous caveats. After that, I usu­al­ly fine-tune the solu­tion. What I like about pat­terns is that they give a clear out­line of the most com­mon way of han­dling a giv­en prob­lem. I do think that they’ll nev­er be a replace­ment for some gen­uine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when inter­ac­tion design­ers will be replaced by a huge pat­tern library…