Do you know that feeling when you imagine a play, an unstoppable game-model, you draw it out on the whiteboard, and then the reality of the match completely shatters your fantasy, throwing the exact opposite of what you had envisioned right in your face?
It is called desire path. The coach mentally paves a spotless path. The game, step by step, tears apart the planned pavement in favor of a real one. Desire paths are the rebellious trails that impose themselves over the “perfection” of a plan that fails to adapt to the singularity, authenticity, of the context.
The “expert” makes it. The ones who walk it must adjust to his plans. Those who resist this poorly exercised power begin to take alternative routes, which, step by step, eventually become dominant pathways. People have an innate need for funcionality greater than any illusion of any coach, any “expert”. Desire paths emerge out of necessity.
On Michigan State University’s there was only grass everywhere that wasn’t a building. Not a single drop of asphalt, cement, or imported stone. The experts —without any quotation marks— chose to let the students create their own paths. A year later, all the spontaneous paths that had emerged from the students’ desires were paved.
There, the designers didn’t forget that the raison d’être of a temple lies in its stones. The hospital is for the patients, not the doctors; the school for the students, not the teachers; the team for the players, not the coach. The university is for the learners, for the students.