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points by keiferski 3 days ago | 0 comments

That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

Actively painting the desire path is next level though ':)

There's a cool project where desire paths were intentionally planned and paved later: https://popupcity.net/radar/elephant-paths-paving-the-way-fo...

[–] jraph 3 days ago

It's not the first time I run into this idea, it's indeed probably a great way to design paths!

[–] c7b 3 days ago

I was wondering, if you were to announce a project like that, whether you'd get some pranksters walking obviously non-sensical routes daily, or funny/offensive shapes, just to mess with it. Humans are trickier to work with than particles. My hunch would be: on the first such projects, maybe, but if that became a new normal it would probably mostly die out over time. I would love if we designed more spaces that way.

[–] jraph 2 days ago

It didn't occur to me but that seems likely indeed that some would attempt this xD

Now, for a path to actually appear, I have the intuition that it would require very, very determined, possibly organized, pranksters for this to be possible, or that they actively damage the grass or something.

Pranks should be obvious to spot, you could always ignore them during analysis (or even keep the really good ones!).

[–] OuterVale 3 days ago

Pretty good way to design software, too. See what users do, then make that thing or make it better.

Of course, this is isn't perfect -- the user doesn't always know what they want.

[–] robaato 3 days ago

The architect Christopher Alexander documented this in "Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press" - one of the foundations for the whole Pattern Language movement which strongly influenced software design.