Monday, February 17, 2020

Desire Path

You've no doubt noticed the paths that form on a college campus, or in a park, or other grassy place with a lot of pedestrian traffic -- the paths that weren't laid out by any landscape designer, but are created by the footfalls of actual people finding the best ways to get to where they need to go. 

The term for these unplanned user-created trails is desire paths.  It can also refer to deer paths or other non-human highways.  The presenter in the linked TED talk says that the designer's job is to see where the desire paths occur and then to pave them.

Desire Paths would be a good title for something.

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Transcribing

A potentially fun, fairly easy, and potentially benevolent activity: being a volunteer online transciber for the Smithsonian Institution.  More details here:

https://transcription.si.edu/browse?filter=owner:1