Why Study Patterns?

Well, so many people have already commented and emphasized so much about this that, I feel, there's no need to rephrase it here (which'd be more or less copy-pasting excerpts from the internet)

Let me express few things I feel about patterns in our lives (we can comment on each):

1. Observing adversary's move-patterns can help you win a game or battle.
2. We search for typical paterns in satellite-images to do weather-forecasting.
3. Psychiatrists observe the behavioral patterns of a patient to know his/her mental dissorder.
4. you can think of more..

So, it looks like we have problems that evolve due to violation of certain basic principles. These priciples seem to be very common (an more common is violating them). This could be the reason we see some repetitiveness in the problems we encounter. You might ask, what principles? Well, that's what we strive to find! And a way is by studying the repetitiveness of the problem - that's precisely the pattern.

So, will that study always help? I don't think so! But, yes, if we are able to correctly decipher the principle that is violated, restoring the principle back increases the probability of getting the problem solved.

So what's next? We need to construct a repertory of 'problems' versus the 'principle(s) violated', which ofcourse requires a lot of experimentation from real life, learning from failures and what not! The good news is, in certain areas, people have already taken pains to do all those. We just need to explore them up!

By the way, does anybody know how a patient is treated in Homoeopathy? This is much similar to applying Design-patterns.

The approach should be to see the problem and understand the basic principle that has been (or is prone to be) violated, rather than opening up a book to find out a pattern that could be applied for a particular problem. This approach could be useful as, the patterns keep evolving, but the principles are more-or-less rigid over the centuries.