How to kill an elephant path
Posted: January 23rd, 2008 | 11 Comments »The last step of a neverending story (see previous episode here and when it all started). The tagline for this would be “how to kill a an unofficial route, a path that is formed in space by people making their own shortcuts“
July 2006:
February 2007:
January 2008:
(the last picture shows the sign that say “please take care of the lawn, don’t cross it please”)
Why do I blog this? this is one of the most interesting aspect of urban life, how people’s intents materialize (‘desire lines’ as one of the comment on my Flickr picture says) and how this is prevented by others forces. In this case, it’s “to protect the lawn”, which is a quite intriguing reason.
In addition, other things to think about: what’s more efficient? the barriers or the warning sign? why isn’t there any other elephant path starting on the other side (where there is no sign)? is it because you just get out of the building and it’s acceptable to take a longer path?
Je viens d’apprendre que le “chemin de l’âne” est pour les anglophones the “elephant path”. Cocasses visions zoologiques !
why not just create a nice footpath where the ‘elephant path’ was dug up in the first place,
based on the natural behaviour of the ‘elephants’?
could have been a lovely solution.
shouldn’t design be inclusive as opposed to exclusive?
It’s funny to see that. I remember a story my grandfather told me once. He was the head of a social housing office in the north of France, and he had to supervise building projects in various suburban area.
In one of their projects, they settled the buildings and didn’t mark any path in the surrounding gardens, and they used the elephant path to determine how to settle the most effective pavements for the inhabitants. It was quite obvious, but your example shows that it is not the case everywhere.
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That looks like democracy in action to me – talk about ‘voting with your feet’
[...] How to kill an elephant path Social pressure and user [...]
My ex-father-in-law used to run the physical facilities department for a small college. Whenever they built/opened a new building they would build the paths the architects wanted, but after a year or so, he would add paths where people actually walked! In a way what this building did is so against the “2.0″ movement, and what my ex-f-i-l did was very customer service oriented.
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[...] is somewhat related to the elephant path (desire line) I often blog about here and there as pointed out by Space and Culture. A desire line can be turned into a design opportunity and thus [...]
[...] Elelphant Path, a social navigation interface based on he thousand of pieces of information inhabitants and visitors share publicly on the web Our idea of Elephant Path germinated years ago with the emergence of new ways of reading and discovering a territory through its digital activities (see my PhD thesis). It collided with our long interest in the principles of social navigation (see rss4you developed by Nicolas and Robi in the early days of content syndication) that leverage traces of activities with the goal to facilitate locating and evaluating information. In the physical world, a classic example of social navigation is a trail (called elephant path, desire line, social trail or desire path) developed by erosion caused by people making their own shortcuts (a phenomenon we like to observe). [...]
[...] A social navigation interface based on he thousand of pieces of information inhabitants and visitors share publicly on the web Our idea of Elephant Path germinated years ago with the emergence of new ways of reading and discovering a territory through its digital activities (see my PhD thesis). It collided with our long interest in the principles of social navigation (see rss4you developed by Nicolas and Robi in the early days of content syndication) that leverage traces of activities with the goal to facilitate locating and evaluating information. In the physical world, a classic example of social navigation is a trail (called elephant path, desire line, social trail or desire path) developed by erosion caused by people making their own shortcuts (a phenomenon we like to observe). [...]