Desire Paths

brilliant

haha.

i'll tell my dad about this one, he's a landscape architect.

As an econ major at Michigan State, I did a research project on the factors governing the formation of these paths on the MSU campus. If you like this you might like the numbers behind it (or you might hate them, actually) -- http://robinsloan.com/msu/path/

There is a story of an architect who designed a university campus in the US, I can't recall which one it was, in which he intentionally didn't complete the final paths and walkways at the very end. His intent was to have students create these 'desire paths' based on how they best navigate the Uni campus. Then after the paths were worn in the architects returned and laid the final paved/concrete paths directly on top of them.

Rice, iirc.

i like the methodology behind it, i suppose you could adopt it to fit other things that involve people and interaction.

Four years ago Peter Merholtz took a look at 'use paths' on the UC Berkeley campus, specifically addressing the barriers that the school erected to stop some of these paths from forming ("Desire blocks"?). In it are a few photos I took in 2000, showing the paths before and after the barricades were erected.

http://www.peterme.com/archives/000073.html

Another one:
http://www.kith-kin.co.uk/projects/project.asp?id=25&index=1

Got to love how everyone is in a hurry to get somewhere, and how an alternative route will grow over time, gaining legitimacy with each traveller as the route is trampled out.

I think this is what you can call "precycling".

deep.

love monibs university campus story, that's true visually communication.

What did George Carlin say? Take a chance, start a path! Looks to me like people were listening. ;o) Thanks for the pix.

When we took a campus tour of the University of South Florida at Tampa the tour guide pointed out the sidewalks that were created by desired paths that were made by students. They paved the walks after the paths were made. Perhaps this is the University mentioned in Monib's post.

Monib, chances are you are thinking about Purdue in West Lafayette, IN. My girlfriend goes there and she once told me how none of the paths were put in initially, letting the wear on the ground (as in these great pictures) dictate where they would be placed. The results are very nice! There are sometimes open areas that have dozens of seemingly random paths, but if you look closer you can see how each functions to move people between the various buildings. I've never heard the term "desire paths," but it very fitting.

I had never thought about something like this before, and now I'll be looking for them everywhere.

What a great subject for a picture..

Gstson Bachelard wrote about this phenomena in The Poetics of Space

Funnily enough I just read an article in Dot Dot Dot magazine which refers to the story I had mentioned. It was a university in Buffalo, in New York State. Is that the one you were thinking of Kevin? The article didn't mention a name, but apparently the architect sent a helicopter up to photograph the paths after they were made.

Something else which readers might also appreciate is a book of observational photos put together by the guys at Frog Design, again I can't recall the name of it. In it they have photographed a range of examples where people have improvised with everyday objects to turn them into functional design tools, out of necessity. For example using a pencil to tie up hair in a bun. Similar to the idea of desire paths, but applied to the discipline of industrial design.

I doubt it was purdue..I went there and all that's there is concrete, asphalt, and brick

Stumbled on this. For YEARS - ever since university at least, which is 25 of them ago now - I've gone on about how the best way to design a campus etc. would be to let people decide where they wanted to walk and then design the paths around that. I never knew that an idea like this existed in reality. (I'm a medic - scope for creative thinking is somewhat limited.)
Now if I can just get someone in authority to acknowledge that the time when traffic flows most quickly and smoothly is when the lights are NOT WORKING, I will have realised another dream.

Seriously. It works. But only if no-one knows who has priority (or 'right of way' as we Brits quaintly call it) at an intersection (or, 'junction' if you will.) Traffic lights are one of the biggest cons of the last 50 years. If you don't believe me watch what happens next time they go down. As long as no-one has priority over anyone else, we resort to primitive hunter-gatherer cooperation mode, and the queues disappear.

the method suggested by doctored was used by the designers of Kenyon College's "Middle Path". Middle path runs about a mile or so straight through the gothic campus in central Ohio and the small town that grew within it after the college was founded some 200 years ago.

Middle path has numerous side paths intersecting it. The designers selected the location and flow of those side paths by observing the foot traffic after a snowfall.

UConn (Storrs) didn't start out this way, but they did end up paving a couple of well-used Desire Paths within the last 5 years. Nice to know that some universities are implementing the idea of letting group consensus determine the paths!

I went to Purdue, and while I was there I heard about how an architect had used desire paths to decide where to put the sidewalks. but when I heard the story it was supposedly about Ohio State.

wonderfull pictere
good hoster

Just a correction to my previous post. The book is actually buy Ideo and not Frog. It's called "Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design". You can see samples here: www.thoughtlessacts.com. It's a great example of design improvisation by non-designers. Or are they...?

These photos are nice ones and touching too.....

if all desire paths would be turned into official paths people would probably create new desire paths until there'll be no green surfaces anymore :(

There are lots of these photos in the flickr group Desire paths. We'd love to se your photos there too.

Here's the link to the flickr group :-

http://www.flickr.com/groups/desire_paths/