Summary: Design patterns are powerful design and reuse tools in software development. However current usage of patterns seem to employ a small portion of the enclosed potential. Commonly, pattern usage is limited to the manual customization of just a few legacy patterns, or documentation of existing designs. We think that a more effective use of the patterns requires standardization and formalization of the pattern utilization. In this work, we propose a formalism based on a fully generalized and purely symbolic interpretation of patterns, which focuses on the representation of reusable knowledge.