The concept of ‘desire path’ is crucial in wayfinding studies.

Desire paths, also known as paths of least resistance, are the paths created when people walk the same ground wearing down the grass – or leaving any other form of erosion on the surface. They are fundamental features to study as they indicate the preferred (almost always the shortest) route between an origin and destination. Their emergence is the implicit indicator of insufficient planning. In the replication of a famous internet meme below, a desire path is shown to represent the crucial difference between Design and User Experience.

Original image by wetwebwork on Flickr

In the design of the paths crossing gardens and connecting buildings on university campuses, the preferred protocol is now to wait and observe for one year to see the natural emergence of desire paths and then pave them the following year. Such implementation happened at UC Berkeley and University of Maryland and in many other public spaces around the world.

Drag mouse to draw your own desire path

Students of the Wayfinding Class at NYUAD monitored our new campus on Saadiyat Island and proposed new paved routes following both the observation of people’s behavior, and the creative instances of remedial design put in place to contain that.

Some students, obviously shocked by the fact that people preferred to walk through the grass rather than walk around it, left a paper note next to the path:

Please, don’t kill me! Signed: The Grass.

It should be noted that maintaining a batch of grass in a campus in Abu Dhabi is way more complicated that it is in Oxford or Boston; so some emotion in seeing this precious feature being eroded is understandable. Still, the rebuttal that followed is exemplary. Another note, placed next to the previous one, stated:

Killing the grass it’s nothing. I am on my way to the canteen: come and see what I do to the salad.