Technologies help people communicate with each other in various ways.With so many advanced techniques these days, however, the design of communication services becomes even more difficult and confusing.This difficulty is more visible in designing Unified Communication systems where similar tools support overlapping communication needs.In this paper, however, we argue that all communications, despite specific techniques and related meanings, have only a limited number of basic patterns, and these patterns together form a structure which reveals the relations among them.These patterns represent methods of applying techniques to support communication between people.This disregard of specific techniques and actual meanings in communication provides a universal perspective for designing communication services in a clearer way.