Desire Paths

A term from urban design describing the unofficial trails that pedestrians wear into grass or dirt when built sidewalks do not meet their needs - the visible trace of an infrastructure users have improvised for themselves. In accessibility design, the metaphor is used (e.g., by Wang and Marie) to describe the workarounds disabled practitioners routinely perform when globally available tools fail them; 'paving the desire paths' means turning those workarounds into first-class features rather than leaving the labor to the user.