Using Open Dialogue Patterns to Improve Conversation in Daily Life

This study explores a novel way of using Open Dialogue Patterns to improve everyday communication. Open Dialogue is a dialogue-based approach frequently utilised in psychotherapy and has been proposed to apply to other situations. We organised the essence of Open Dialogue by using pattern language so as not to be limited to the field of psychotherapy (Iba et al., Open dialogue patterns: a pattern language for collaborative problem dissolving. Viking Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, 2017; Nagai et al., Basic patterns for dialogical meeting: open dialogue patterns, Part2. 22st European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP2017), 2017). In this study, we employed a learning programme to improve everyday conversation using Open Dialogue Patterns and confirmed four participants and ten cases. The results reported herein suggest that these patterns are effective through ‘utilisation to deepen understanding of interpersonal relations’, ‘induction of the inquiry of effective dialogue’ and ‘recognition of the dialogue as a design issue.’