Abstract: The design of interactive systems, especially in distributed research projects, is a challenging process in which many concepts are developed with successful outcomes but also with dissatisfying results. In order to structure and relay knowledge about good or bad approaches, design patterns are a well-known instrument in research and development. Due to the condition that a design pattern must be easy to read, different stakeholders in the system engineering and design process are able to understand the described concepts without the need of specific expert knowledge . In distributed projects, application design knowledge may be scattered and documented in different manners. This means, before we can start formulating patterns, we need to discover and gather the available and partially concealed design knowledge. Since these fragments of knowledge may not always be accurately formulated for being used as design patterns, we seek for a collaborative method for collecting and formulating early findings together with established design knowledge. In this paper we present a concept of an evolutionary process for capturing, formulating, refining and validating design patterns. Our approach aims at involving as many stakeholders as possible in order to shape a pattern language over a project’s lifetime in a collaborative process allowing facile participation. We implement our approach in the scope of the EU research project BRIDGE that aims at supporting inter-agency collaboration during emergency response. We close with a discussion of the current state and envisioned next steps in order to foster our considerations.