The advent of interactive shared media spaces has augmented the traditional role of multimedia by providing a natural and intuitive means for interpersonal communication. These shared media-rich environments serve as a natural basis for distributed collaboration through a seamless blend of presentational, conversational and interactive multimedia. This integration, however, presents challenges ranging from the need to support various media types to managing real-time object interaction. This work addresses how to facilitate media space design by employing reflection as a primary design, implementation and management technique within a pattern-based meta-level architecture. Reflection is used to isolate system-level issues such as behavioural coordination from low-level, media-specific computation as well as to facilitate dynamic adaptation of differing behavioural requirements. The architectural framework and underlying topology are illustrated along with the model’s application to a distance education system. Finally, the prototype and its use of the ObjecTime CASE tool are overviewed.