Designing toward "desire lines"
Arts managers make and maintain paths for human movement. It's worth noticing where people wander off.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back…They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move.—Sam Walter Foss, from “The Calf-Path”
While it’s not in the job description, arts managers are landscape architects. They spend much of their days making and maintaining pathways for human movement, discourse, and thought. A theater lobby or museum exhibit defines paths for physical movement. Nonprofit bylaws and other governance documents assign paths for discussion and decision-making. Organizational policies shape possible and probable paths in human thought.
Yet the official pathways aren’t always the ones most traveled by. And that can make all the difference.
In landscape architecture, these actual pathways are called “desire lines.” They are the “dirt paths that develop over time as individuals independently bypass formal sidewalks and imprint new paths on the physical landscape” (Nichols 2014). They are “unsanctioned paths worn only by frequent footsteps” (Luckert 2012).
You’ve seen them in parks and public squares, where a dirt path will cut a corner or cross a lawn. They are the consequence of hundreds of individuals making or following an alternate route.
In sociology, Laura Nichols (2014) and others suggest the idea of social desire paths — “emergent phenomena that occur when individuals interact with formal social structures that are not working for them.” These are recurring behaviors where many individuals “have created their own route outside of those prescribed by abstract place makers” (Smith and Walters 2018).
As a trail maker and path maintainer, these desire lines can either frustrate or intrigue you. It can certainly be frustrating when people aren’t moving through the building in the way they’re “supposed” to; when the board isn’t following its own bylaws; when ticketing policies make extra work for staff and multiple workarounds by patrons.
But it can also be intriguing to notice how people actually move through, make sense of, and take action with your organization despite your thoughtful designs. Sometimes, instead of building more guardrails, it can be fruitful to follow the desire lines and move the paths to match them.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Hosting & Guesting
Hosting involves inviting, greeting, and supporting those who enter your circle; Guesting includes acknowledging, honoring, and listening in the circles where you are a guest.
Framework of the Week: Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA)
The Motivation Opportunity Ability (MOA) framework offers three ways to interrogate the actions or inactions of an individual or a group: motivation to achieve the intended action or outcome; opportunity provided (or blocked) by the external environment related to that action or outcome; and ability or internal capacity to accomplish the action or outcome.
Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash
Sources
Luckert, Erika. 2012. “Drawings We Have Lived: Mapping Desire Lines in Edmonton.” Constellations 4 (1).
Nichols, Laura. 2014. “Social Desire Paths: An Applied Sociology of Interests.” Social Currents 1 (2): 166–72.
Smith, Naomi, and Peter Walters. 2018. “Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments.” Urban Studies 55 (13): 2980–95.