According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, a desire line (also known as a desire path, social trail, goat track or bootleg trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by footfall or by bicycle. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination.

Desire lines are those well-worn ribbons of dirt that you see cutting across a patch of grass or park, often with nearby paths, particularly those that offer a less direct route, ignored. These paths are never perfectly straight but instead, they meander like a river this way and that.  

As such they are shortcuts.  However, desire lines can also be viewed as paths of least resistance.  They are developed organically as individuals choose their own routes, rather than keeping to the existing constructed and purposefully designed pathways.  Desire lines show that it is human to choose, but it is also human to choose what other people have chosen before.

For years, I have thought about this image of user-created paths as a metaphor for person-centred care.  As I have seen them in my travels and journeyings, I have been challenged to think and rethink the design of rehabilitation services and programmes. It doesn’t matter how beautiful you’ve designed the rehabilitation landscape – if you fail to provide a person-centred way to get from point A to point B people are going to try to carve out a shortcut. And I suggest that rather than just reluctantly accepting it, this is something we should allow for and encourage…

Too often design is an imposition of a pattern without enough care as to how people actually operate. I like the idea of seeing the patterns that emerge outside the official structure of planning. I really like the idea that how we honestly function in a space could help define how that space is designed.

A better approach is to try to see and understand where the desire lines in our services are being created and adjust our rehabilitation programmes and interventions to those desire lines. The people who use our services will also help us to optimise them.  As Frank Zappa has said,

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

How willing are we to journey with people through and over their desire lines rather than via established ‘rehabilitation pathways’?