If you've walked across a school, or office campus,
or through a shopping center,
you've probably noticed little paths like this.
Perhaps you took the shortcut through the bushes
instead of staying on the formal brick path,
or maybe you shook your head at the thoughtless creatons who
trampled through the landscaping just to shave a few seconds off of their walk.
These rogue paths have been called desire lines, desire paths,
cow paths and they've had a surprising influence on the technology we use every day.
In 1998, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas won
a fiercely competitive bid to design
a new building at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
It would be his first project in the United States.
This is what he designed.
Back in 1997, he had a team go and observe the way students moved across campus,
the way they cut to and from residence halls and
academic buildings across this lot under the train tracks.
He used those desire lines to inform the interior layout of the building,
which won wide critical acclaim at its unveiling.
Schools from the University of Maryland to UC Berkeley,
to Virginia Tech, Ohio state all have some version of this lore.
The campus was pathless until students formed their own paths,
which were later formalized by bricks.
Weirdly enough, hashtags are another example of desire lines at work.
They're everywhere now.
But Twitter's designers didn't build that feature, their users did.
In early 2007, a Twitter user who also happen to be a developer,
Chris Messina suggested that Twitter begin grouping topics using the hash symbol.
Twitter shrugged it off.
There were fires all along the roadway there.
It just came roaring through.
In October 2007, San Diego County was besieged by a series of wildfires.
Fire just seems to be uncontrollable, unpredictable.
There's just no words.
For almost a month, the county was engulfed in flames.
Over a half a million people were evacuated and 10 people died.
During the firestorm, people began using the #sandiegofire
at Messina's suggestion to post updates about the rapidly changing situation.
It was clear that people wanted a way to join specific conversations organized by topic.
The hashtag took off.
By 2009, Twitter had officially incorporated the hashtag into its platform.
Desire lines are the unvarnished truth about how people use what you've built.
So, pave the cow paths has emerged as a mantra among
the people who build apps and platforms user experience designers.
They think of the Internet as a wide open,
grassy plain and they can watch to see what users do and where they go.
Once you see how desire lines work,
you'll spot them everywhere.
Celebrities from Ariana Grande,
to Kim Kardashian, to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey,
have all used screenshots of the notes app
to get around the limitations of Twitter or Instagram.
So, you could think of that as a desire line.
Google's autocomplete search results are another response to desire lines.
So, our job is to watch for these desire paths emerging and where appropriate pave them.
Designers are using our behaviors and desires to shape the digital worlds we inhabit.
Now that you know what desire lines are and how they function,
you'll probably start seeing and feeling them at
work in all of the digital tools you use.
Thanks so much for watching.
Beat a path down with the comments section to chat all these desire lines.
What examples have you noticed in the digital world or the physical world?
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