One thing nice about freshly fallen snow is that people start to make paths where none had existed below it. First footsteps naturally conjure spiritual aspects. This is where metaphors can become empowering, either for spiritual enlightenment or as inspiration for creative pursuits.
One would think that there would be no opposition to their creation, but in fact, barriers are constructed to prevent desire paths, and they are carved anyway. Illegal immigrants make desire paths (or tunnels) as an expression of the determination to escape or cross boundaries. Terrorists are determined to cunningly achieve their myriad objectives.
At the cultural level, attempts to control art and music can be subverted in ways that are just as creative as the art itself: Music banned in the Soviet Union was pressed on old X-Ray films as a “desire path”.
Some desire path metaphors in other domains other than the more obvious examples:
Algorithms on social networks (desire paths as shortcuts to apparent preferences for the purpose of monetizing user-generated information)
Street art (desire path away from hegemonic constraints of museums and galleries)
Free Jazz (attempt to carve a desire path across tonal music.) In this track by Ornette Coleman, tonality is still there at 90-degree angles in the funk groove, but Coleman melodically cuts across the corners of the composition.
Desire Path images:
The Crooked Path (Jeff Wall):
At one of the parks where I live, they had changed the walking path through it several years ago, and you can still see the original path (“scar tissue”) where it had been sodded over. Desire paths like this are really great reminders of old paths that are tempting to be taken. (I’ve never seen anyone cut across). Sometimes they shape whatever gets built on or around it:
From The 99% Invisible City:
“As cities evolve, architecture often expands to fill in abandoned routes originally designed for cars, trains, or other forms of transportation. Once rows or tracks are gone, the voids that remain are sometimes rendered solid in the form of new buildings, their edges conforming to the shapes of forgotten thoroughfares. The result is a kind of architectural scar tissue as if the built environment were feeling in healing old wounds. At street level, the effect can be subtle. Individual buildings may feature an unusual angle here or there, but when seen from above, larger patterns emerge on blocks or even entire neighborhoods. Such scars are especially noticeable when they are set against the comprehensive planning schemes of urban grids.”
The Chicago Area Transportation Study was done during the Eisenhower administration, yet seems contemporary. Now we use big data, but the same methods were used back then, and result in similar infographics made today. The city limits almost appear to be carved organically by the terminus points of transportation desire paths/lines:
Boundaries are a desire path as well. Here is a boundary between Yemen, Oman, and Saudi Arabia:
Two contradicting desire paths—a political boundary overlaying complex fractal water flow patterns:
Takeaways:
Creativity can have these kinds of “desire paths” when applied as metaphors. It is a shortcut or heuristic.
Shortcuts can become ruts and will steer you away from areas with more opportunity.
As in the “scar tissue” urban example", desire paths can become permanent, but are dormant and inert, and create new frameworks and boundaries to create in.
In terms of analog vs. digital, analog is the metaphorical desire path across the digital grid. Even zooming in to the most minute levels, there will be a curve overlaying a pixel grid. What you want are “Bezier Curves” as metaphors.
Creativity is a path to meaning, but that path has to be circular or spiral, bringing in other aspects of life on its way up, rather than saying "I'm going to go there" and not seeing anything along the way.