Desire Paths

 The university where I teach has a very small student run newspaper. Published only once a week, it is usually four pages, two of which are sudoku puzzles and photographs. This is a tech school, so while we have some great writers, journalism is not strongly represented.  But, this week a cover story caught my eye. Grasswalkers: Illinois Institute of Technology and Desire Paths.

What is a desire path you might ask? According to Wikipedia, it is "an unplanned small trail created as a consequence of mechanical erosion."  It is a path people have made for convenience.  Think of the way we cut across a corner, or walk straight instead of following a curved sidewalk or path.

 In the 1990s the university constructed a new student center on a parcel of land that was vacant. In the design of the building the architects used the "desire paths" the students had created across the open field as the guide for the building's corridors. The result is a building that feels very confusing. The hallways seem to be at odd angles and intersect in sharp angles.  What worked for an open field doesn't seem as well-suited for a building.

And it makes sense, doesn't it?  A desire path is created to minimize travel time or maximize convenience. Once you plop a building down the old paths lose their advantage to some extent. The expectations we have for how a building corridor will function are different than those we hold for open fields.

 

(The student center is the rectangle in the middle of this plan and the orange lines show the "desire paths." Giving you an interior like the below.)

 

But, the whole thing got me thinking about desire paths. They are both rebellious and conformist at the same time. We are railing against the prescribed pathway, but doing so with everyone else. We aren't making our own unique path, we are following a crowd. A rebellious crowd, perhaps, but a crowd nonetheless. How often do we all desire the same thing?  Will there eventually be offshoots from the desire path, representing new desires?

It just so happened that at the same time I was mulling over desire paths, I came across a passage in a book I was reading (The Ten Thousand Doors of January). A young scholar was told he needed to "find a path." But he despaired over the two choices he had been offered. "But to Yule both paths were unspeakably bleak. Both of them would necessitate a narrowing of his boundless horizons, an end to his dreaming." 

Can we use desire paths outside of discussions of the built environment? What if your desire path doesn't fall along the beaten trail? 

More to come.....