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The Design IT! conference deals with the intersection of six recurring themes in the design and IT communities: Content Management, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Usability, Design Management, and Strategy. I was invited to deliver a keynote for the design track due to my involvement with the Yahoo! User Interface Library.
My talk, From Design Pattern to API, was intended to bring awareness to the field of design patterns and also explain how they can serve as the design blueprints for a developer's API specification.
Traditionally, when something is designed, its mode of use and essence of being are implicitly defined. This may yield a very specific solution to a very specific need, but upon further analysis, one is likely to find recurring patterns in other realms. Design patterns describe an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context and act as a perfect analogue to the engineering need of defining application programming interfaces (APIs). When design patterns clearly communicate atomic elements of the interface and interaction a flexible API can be constructed. As demonstrated by the Yahoo! User Interface Library, a flexible API can accommodate a wide range of design implementations. It is the journey from design pattern definition to implementation via APIs that yields a product that is consistent, extensible, and usable.
This session discusses the following: