Desire Infrastructure
I'm playing on the term "desire paths" here, the paths that show up where people actually want to walk, not just where the planners of sidewalks and roads want them to walk.
I'm playing on the term "desire paths" here, the paths that show up where people actually want to walk, not just where the planners of sidewalks and roads want them to walk.
River Kenna • Soul-Making Productivity: A Process Manifesto
Landscape architects are increasingly embracing desire lines from the outset, allowing desire lines to emerge in parks and campuses over a period of many months, and then paving the lines to make permanent walkways. The approach is certainly preferable to the more common alternative: Attempt to predict how people will navigate a landscape, render t
... See moreKritina Holden • Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design
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
It is in the collision of such contrasting ideas — the agonistics of design philosophies, almost — that we can endlessly generate a diversity of responses, and thus build ongoing resilience.
Medium • 11: Post-traumatic urbanism and radical indigenism
Keely Adler added
But the emergent, informal, human-made lines are organized not only by efficiency but by desire. The human individual is also making a path through life, through interiors and exteriors, a life that cannot be measured in abstract bureaucratic terms.
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
Understanding Living Systems
The OMA group studied desire lines and used them to plan the campus center, unified by a long single roof. The building wasn’t so much a new creation as an observation of extant use: it effectively enclosed the pathways and connections between activities on campus that were already established.
Sara Hendren • What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
We’re building edgeless environments of divergency. Things are added in chaos, then if successful, they expanded further and further out until they collapse and rearrange. This is probably why responsive design feels so relevant, maddening, and divisive: its patterns mimic the larger patterns of technology itself.
Frank Chimero • Frank Chimero · The Web’s Grain
Sixian added