Is it a pattern?

I have noticed a trend in application design, one which I suppose became obvious some years ago when I really became interested in the use of reflection and the advantages of metadata in the form of attributes used at design time.

I was busy with a project for a financial sector client and had to come up with applications that were able to edit really complex data types but do it in a way that was easy for a developer to reuse in an application. At the time I was doing a lot of .Net design time work so my awareness of attributes such as TypeConverterAttribute and EditorAttribute came in handy. I also developed my own attributes to be used in presentation layer stuff and found that the idea of creating a tiny helper class that was instantiated when required, used and let go again was a recurruing theme. For example, when properties are read for databinding, the TypeConverter for the data type will be invoked and I found that I applied the same model to many other things in my applications.

Now I see the same trend in WPF for example when its so simple to write a tiny bit of code which is instantiated in the static resources and used to provide useful calculation, binding or conversion routines. As an application designer and, as I see this as a pattern, I wonder if there is really room for a formal "Granular instance" pattern and if it becomes worthy of mention.