Are.na
are.na
There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.
On Shortcuts and Longcuts
But desire lines may also be evidence of something more than pure practicality. The casual disobedience of a desire path as an alternative to the formally prescribed walkway is remarkable simply as a human choice, willfully out of step with the way things are.
Sara Hendren • What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
As Fritjof Capra says: a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. At best, we will find ways of carefully nudging a living system. According to Donella Meadows, we must find its leverage points, those pivots that allow us to influence system behavior. Most importantly: after each cautious inter- vention, we must patiently o... See more
