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PLoP 2025 – 32nd Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices
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PLoP 2025 – 32nd Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices

Program

Conference Program and Schedule

Whether you’re new to PLoP or returning, check out this PLoP Preparation Guide
for practical advice and insider tips to help you fully engage with the community.

Click here to download Jeff Xiong’s “A Pattern Language for Knowledge Engineering with Large Language Models”

Click here for a restaurant list for Dinner on Your Own with Friends for Monday, 10/13

Writers’ Workshop Sessions

Accepted papers have been organized into Writers’ Workshops based on an overall theme. If you are an author, please download and read the papers in your group before the conference. Be prepared to attend all sessions of your writers’ workshop group and be part of the discussion of each paper.

At the conference, the papers are discussed in Writers’ Workshops with groups of paper authors and possibly other conference participants. Authors are expected to take into account comments they received in the Writers’ Workshops to improve their papers.

If you are a non-author, we invite you to read the papers that interest you and then join in one or more Writers’ Workshop sessions.

You can find more information on Writers’ Workshops here.

All Writers’ Workshop papers can be downloaded here.

Click arrows for each Writers’ Workshop Group to view/download papers.

Detecting Machine Learning Design Patterns from Code with Machine Learning Based Approach
by Weitao Pan, Hironori Washizaki, Nobukazu Yoshioka, Naoyasu Ubayashi, and Zhixu Liu
Monday, 10:30am-11:30am

Architecting Machine Learning and AI Systems: A Design PatFtern Roadmap for Pre-Training and Model Selection
by Joseph Reid, Satish Srinivasan, and Raghu Sangwan
Monday, 11:30am-12:30pm

A Conversational Privacy Pattern Catalog
by Anna Leschanowsky, Zahra Kolagar, and Birgit Popp
Monday, 4:30pm-5:30pm

GenAI Storage and Content Management Patterns
by Kyle Brown, Joe Yoder, and Steven Atkin
Tuesday, 2:00pm-3:00pm

The Multi Persona Integration Pattern Comparing Large Language Models Applied to Medical Advice
by William Schreiber, Douglas C. Schmidt, and Jules White
Tuesday, 3:00pm-4:00pm

Click here to download Group 1 papers.

What Aspects of Pattern Language Do People Value?: Unveiling Values Through Understanding Their Prior Experiences and Thoughts
by An Hikino and Takashi Iba
Monday, 10:30am-11:30am

Patterns and their Umwelt – How to Make Patterns Come to Life
by Rebecca Wirfs-Brook and Christian Kohls
Monday, 11:30am-12:30pm

Patterns for a New Generation: In-Person and Virtual Workshops
by Joseph Corneli, Charles Danoff, Raymond Puzio, Sridevi Ayloo, Serge Belich, Mary Tedeschi, and Charlotte Pierce
Tuesday, 11:30am-12:30pm

Free and Libre Learning Objects, an E-Learning Pattern Language
by Charles Danoff and Sridevi Ayloo
Tuesday, 4:30pm-5:00pm

Making Commissioned Work More Alive with Patterns
by Aleksandra Vranić and Valentino Vranić
Tuesday, 5:00pm-5:30pm

Click here to download Group 2 papers.

Mixing Educational Value and Entertainment Games through Patterns
by Branislava Vranić and Júda Vodrážka
Monday, 10:30am-11:30am

Balancing Ethics and Crisis: A Pattern for Media Companies
by Mary, Tedeschi, Chintan Prakash Chauhan, Rushabh Virendra Gandhi, Sariya Rizwan, and Sergio Belich
Monday, 11:30am-12:30pm

What and How Do Landscape Ecologists Observe? Describing Professional Perspectives in the Form of Pattern Language
by Masafumi Nagai, Mahito Kamada, and Takashi Iba
Monday, 4:30pm-5:30pm

Animating Pattern Languages to Repair the World
by Douglas Schuler and Aldo de Moor
Tuesday, 10:30am-11:30am

Local Pattern Language: Articulating the Essence of Practices in Individual Cases Rather Than Seeking Universality
by Takashi Iba, Arisa Kamada, Masafumi Nagai, Mahito Kamada, and Kiyoka Hayashi
Tuesday, 11:30am-12:30pm

Click here to download Group 3 papers.

A Brief Review of Mathematical Design Patterns
by Joseph Reid, Satish Srinivasan, and Raghu Sangwan
Monday, 2:00pm-3:00pm

WebTA: A Pattern-Driven Code Critiquer
by Leo Ureel II, Laura Brown, Michelle Jarvie-Eggart, Jon Sticklen, Laura Albrant, Mary Benjamin, and Daniel Masker
Monday, 3:00pm-4:00pm

A Pedagogical Pattern-Based Approach to Effective Online Teaching of Software Engineering and Model Driven Engineering
by Dina Salah
Tuesday, 2:00pm-3:00pm

Discovering Design Patterns in Mathematics
by Joseph Reid, Satish Srinivasan, and Raghu Sangwan
Tuesday, 3:00pm-4:00pm

Protopatterns in the Pattern Language of Data Preparation and Assaying
by Michael Salé
Tuesday, 4:30pm-5:00pm

Click here to download Group 4 papers.

Don’t Get Burned! Cooling Down Your Self-Custody Hot Wallet
by Francisco Gindre, Mariano G. Claveria, Matías Urbieta, and Gustavo Rossi
Monday, 2:00pm-3:00pm

Flow Focused Testing Strategies: Working Towards a Pattern Language Alternative to the Test Pyramid
by Karl Evard and Rebecca Wirfs-Brook
Monday, 3:00pm-4:00pm

Legacy System Modernization at The New York Times: A Systems Approach
by Rohit Arora and Indu Alagarsamy
Tuesday, 10:30am-11:30am

Assessing User Interface Design by Alexander’s Approach to Building Architecture
by Branislava Vranić
Tuesday, 11:30am-12:30am

Click here to download Group 5 papers.

Imagination Run Wild Sessions

In addition to Writers’ Workshops, PLoP features a variety of other sessions under the umbrella of “Imagination Run Wild.” These sessions offer everyone, including newcomers, an opportunity to learn about patterns and related topics.

Click arrows to expand and view abstracts.

MONDAY

The need for a globally available generalized pattern library and community resource has been surfaced many times. There is currently no viable option, and this session does not propose one. However, the game design focused patternlanguageforgamedesign.com library might provide a template for such a resource. This Imagination Run Wild session invites participants to attempt to record patterns they have created in a private copy of the above tool. This will expose ways in which the existing tool is insufficient and allow interested participants to provide feedback on whether further development and modification of this tool are a viable path towards a Living Pattern Library.

Playing a card game is fun! You know what’s even MORE fun? Playing MORE card games!! In addition to the fun of playing games for their own sake, we will also use them as a way to think of more inclusive technological futures and to learn. 21st century technological advances have already created scary outcomes like the rampant spread of misinformation across countries and hallucinations being shared as facts. Cities are often hotbeds of technological change for good and bad. To explore that we will start by playing “Flaws of the Smart City”. The game “is a critical kit to explore the dark faces of the so-called Smart Cities. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities embed flaws. This kit aims to fix these weak spots or to exploit them to set chaos.” After playing the game we will do a review session to note down what we learned. Within that context about thinking of the positive and negative impacts of technology on society, for our second game we will play “The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies”. It has cards that “will help us foresee a future where technologies are designed by people who are too often excluded from or targeted by technology in today’s world.” The game was “designed to help us collectively envision and share ideas for transfeminist technologies from the future”. To operationalize those big ideas about inclusive futures we cannot be afraid and that’s why we will next play the “Fearless Change Game”. We will use those cards to navigate through the inevitable obstacles we will face on the path to the future we collectively imagined. Afterwards we the notetakers will write down the strategies we decided upon to get unstuck. At the end we will come together to make a ‘zine summarizing lessons learned. Each participant and/or group will make pages with art or words capturing what they learned. After the session the pages will be assembled by the organizers and distributed to attendees as a learning artifact. Given the ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI) news these days, many of which rely upon Generative Pretrained Transformers (e.g., ChatGPT) it seems appropriate to draw connections to the fictional Transformers universe. Both the autobots led by Optimus Prime and Decepticons led by Megatron are full of talented, powerful individual robots. Some of them are combiners like the five destructions can come together to form Devastator and the trainbots can combine to make Raiden (younger attendees may relate fusion gems from Steven Universe). The metaphor of the combiner transformers is a way to think about combining the games. They are fun and important on their own, and combined they can become something more powerful.

Conflicts are essential for stories. Conflicts also inspire writers. Stories need not be only fictional. Even scientific papers need stories. Patterns and pattern sequences can be conveyed better or even validated with stories. In this focus group, the participants will write their own stories with the help of selected techniques of creative writing such as fairytale cocktail, a hat full of words, or figurines from a suitcase, supervised by an experienced creative writing teacher. The participants will have a chance to read their stories and learn how others perceive them in a sort of mini writers’ workshops. Based on this immediate writing experience, the position of conflicts with respect to stories and patterns in general will be discussed.

TUESDAY

This session is a riff on the Writers Workshops, but is intended to help pattern authors refine their patterns and improve their content and structure. Pattern authors often use innovative and idiosyncratic processes and structures, and this session is intended to allow those ideas to be shared, both to encourage convergence on best practices and to promote understanding of diverse pattern forms. The session would be appropriate for both experienced authors bringing patterns and prospective authors looking to understand the possibility space. Patterns brought to this session would not need to be new, with authors being encouraged to bring both foundational and fresh patterns.

What valued aspects of pattern languages captivate you, and why? This workshop explores what valued aspects participants feel toward the conception of pattern language, and what personal roots lie in their prior experiences and thoughts. We are developing a unique interview methodology to mine the valued aspects that pattern language enthusiasts feel toward this approach, along with the personal roots in their prior experiences and thoughts. In our paper submitted to PLoP this year, we have already applied this interview method to unveil the valued aspects and their personal roots as perceived by five pattern language creators. The findings were remarkably intriguing and compelling. At PLoP, where people fascinated by pattern languages gather, we would love to explore this method together with all of you. Would you join us in mining the valued aspects you feel toward pattern languages and tracing back to their personal roots in your prior experiences and thoughts?

WEDNESDAY

Alexander stresses that community participation is an essential feature in the patterns philosophy. In order for the language to be used, all stakeholders must take part in creating a pattern language. It is only then that it can become a communal language. We honored this process at PLoP 2024 when we worked together to begin mining some potential patterns for a “Global Warming Leadership” (tentative title) pattern language.The output of the 2024 session was a collection of cards. This Imagination Run Wild session will take the next step. We will explore these cards in a “World Cafe” session and create the next level of pattern drafts. The output of the Cafe will be papers of pattern drafts. At the end, each participant will be invited to take ownership of one or more of these pattern drafts created during the Cafe. During the upcoming year, they will write one or more pattern(s) for inclusion in a PLoP 2026 paper.

This workshop is intended to help create the rudiments of a very impressive / ambitious / Quixotic effort to scale up Patterns and Pattern languages in a global way, to think imaginatively (and wildly!) about the limits of the approach — and to blow right through them.

In this roundtable discussion, Shirley and Brandon will present their preliminary thoughts and concerns on integrating pattern languages into the research processes and methodologies used to create their dissertations, both of which are concerned with designing games for older people. They will present several challenges they are facing in applying concepts from pattern scholars such as Iba and Barney, and invite attending scholars and practitioners to share their pattern research methodologies while contributing what Shirley and Brandon consider to be strengths of their own processes to the community.

What are the patterns that support a vibrant pattern culture? This session invites participants to step back and reflect on the evolution of PLoP and pattern culture more broadly. Drawing on twelve years of Peeragogy Project experience—and five workshops at PLoP conferences—the facilitators will convene an interactive exploration of how the process of working with pattens has evolved and diversified across domains—and have a look at how participants want things to go in the future. Attendees will bring their own experiences of writing, applying, or living patterns—in software, education, activism, research, design, development, etc.—and join in rapidly prototyping “pattern language of pattern culture” on the spot. We will run the session using a fishbowl format that is a variation of the writer’s workshop’s inner and outer rings, and will use the Peeragogy Project’s Action Review format to keep track of learning within the session. Pending participant permission, all contributions will be recorded, and may be collaboratively written up for inclusion in this or future conference proceedings.

In this Focus Group, the participants will be able to create their own user interface prototypes using patterns expressed from Christopher Alexander’s Fundamental Properties. The participants will also be able to learn how to transform user interfaces into building architecture metaphors, thus allowing for applying Alexander’s patterns primarily intended for physical spaces.

Generative AI (GenAI) has had a major impact in many areas over the last few years. Agentic systems are a subset of Generative AI that have recently become even more important. This focus group will be a pattern mining exercise to explore proven techniques in the area of Agentic AI, including software implementation, prompting, and the GenAI user experience.

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