Desire Lines- Influencing Direction.

Desire lines is a concept i've came across from looking at geocaching, urban exploration and the human's tendancy to cut corners. Often if you walk across a landscape you will begin to discover that people are creating their own informal, unofficial paths. Cutting inbetween walkways or creating a whole new route all together. I've seen this for myself in fields and you see it alot on rural walks. I went mountain walking and I seen lots of these created paths and pavements. Alot of these paths become accepted and end up being made official and sometimes they are barricaded. The closed one's often become re-used. Most in-formal are ignored and remain untouched. These paths are formally known as desire lines.

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail"
                                                 Ralph Waldo Emerson.

At this stage of my work the most important thing to me is how my movement and direction has been affected and what has influenced me. How have I took advantage of space? 

What intereted me was how over the last four or five months my movement and direction had been affected and influenced. How i've taken advantage of space but more importantly how all humans take space and freedom for granted. I think sometimes we underestimate the freedom to roam almost anywhere on the planet. The only places we cannot go to we are told by other humans! I've noticed our common, regular useage of shortcuts. By foot or any type of transport. On foot there is hardly no limits on possibilities of where you can go, yet its not our feet which do the talking its our brains. Our heads see and create solutions under influence.

The aim of travel or movement is to get from A to B and a human tendancy is to do anything to make this easier and quicker. One of the most valuable things in life is time. I've looked at some un-noticable spacial direction, things we do all the time and don't even notice. Do we walk in straight lines or do we swerve? Do we move to avoid things? How big are our steps? These are just some questions. There are so many elements to do with movement and i'm just talking about small movements. I will look at how we use space as a world. When I walk down the street I see lots of things which could influence my direction, road signs, directions and advertisements. These are several techniques such as imagery, (signs,posters,markings etc.) and sounds that organisations use to influence our desisions. We are aware of certain sounds such as  HGV reversing or an ambulance both warning signals revealing danger. So these are technical instructions to protect us. Im interested in how these signals influence people's movement and why they influence them. My aim is to create something with a purpose to influence people's minds and penultamately direction.