Desire lines

[francis]

Jeffrey Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0405c.shtml) describes this article on Desire Lines (http://www.pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/archives/process_designing/2005/000622.html#000622) as a "short, pithy blog post will keep you thinking for days" and that "the analogy to what web designers do is obvious, but it goes deeper". I'm not sure if it's the comment that said I'll be thinking about it for days or not, but it has been popping into my head a good few times in the last 48 hours or so.

I've never heard of desire lines, but I'm suspecting that David and Tom will know more.

[David]

Yes indeed. The article gives a good general idea of what desire lines are.

The sad fact is that landscape architects are rarely (if ever) afforded the opportunity to experiment with public spaces to the extent that they can use emerging desire lines to inform their design. It is, of course, possible to take an existing site where desire lines have not been recognised and use them as a basis for circulation and then redesign taking that into account.

There are obvious analogies with web design here. One could consider that the traffic/circulation design for a physical public site is like the navigation design for a website. The difference is that mistakes in the real work become tangible - grass is worn away etc. whereas mistakes in the virtual world are less tangible.

In both cases, the impetus for people to buck the design will depend upon the need to get from A to B quickly. On a website that means the usefulness of the information and in the real world it means the degree to which the individual must visit a specific place.

In both cases there may be alternative sites that give better/easier access to the information/place.

The advantage that web designers have is that they may build as many ways/paths/routes as they please in order to facilitate direct access to information, whereas the physical world dictates physical limits. On the other hand, it's much easier for web designers to over-complicate navigation design, leading to confusion. In the real world, the target can often be seen, website designers must rely more on waymarkers.

Hmm, this is an interesting topic. I'll think more.