You’re Not the Problem: Desire Paths at Home

I’ve been wanting to write about desire paths at home for the longest time and I finally feel like I have enough solid examples to share!

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of desire paths, it’s an idea normally used in urban planning. You know when you’re walking somewhere and you see a path worn into the grass or dirt, usually a more direct route than the sidewalk to where people wanted to go? That’s a desire path! Sure you can put up fences or signs saying “don’t walk on the grass” but often this isn’t a case of people trespassing for fun, it’s a case of people telling you what they need. So in many cases, the solution is to pave that pathway! Make it a sidewalk and give people the solution they’ve been indirectly asking for.

Desire paths in the context of your home can look a few different ways! It might be items cluttering up a surface, things being left where they “don’t belong,” or furniture that keeps getting bumped or moved. Obviously sometimes homes just get messy, but if you find that no matter how often you hang the coats back in the closet the next day you still find them draped over a chair it might be time to start asking yourself why.

Why aren’t coats winding up back in the closet? Maybe small children can’t reach to hang them themselves. Maybe the closet is far from the door so if you know you’re running back out the door again you don’t want to spend the extra time. Maybe a rain jacket is wet and you want it to dry before shoving it back in the closet. Is the answer to get frustrated every day when you have to hang the coats back up AGAIN, or is it to install some coat hooks next to the door? To add a lower rod to your closet so kids can put away their own coats? To make sure there are enough hangers, or sturdier ones?

Rather than blaming people for messes, misplaced items, or trampled grass, the concept of desire paths encourages us to blame the design. Rather than trying to change peoples’ behaviour (which is a symptom of bad design) we should instead fix the root problem by designing a solution that works better.

Once you identify a problem, you need to figure out what kind of solution will make the most sense based on the problem, as well as your budget and time.

level 1: quick fixes

Some solutions can be as simple as deciding that wherever that thing lands IS where it belongs. We always had mail and receipts piling up on the window ledge and the sight of the clutter stressed me out. But, mail makes sense in that area - it’s close to where we get it from, and close to where it often needs to end up (in the recycling bin or headed back out to the post office). So I took this tray from another room and just.. put it there. The mail still lands there but now it feels intentional so it doesn’t bother me.

This was free since I already had a tray, and took literally one minute (two if you count wiping down the surface) but ever since things feel so much more tidy!

level 2: small diy projects

Obviously this one is COVID-specific but for the first several months of this pandemic we had piles of clean and dirty masks sitting on the armrest of our couch. It felt so messy and also not very hygienic but it made sense, we obviously need clean masks available on our way out the door and a spot to put dirty ones as soon as we came in. I installed this organizing rod on the inside of the front closet and added two buckets - one for clean masks and one for dirty one. I can also use it to organize our hats and gloves, and post-pandemic they can hold sunglasses or car keys! Now it’s easy for us to grab a mask on our way out the door, and to find the dirty ones when it’s time to do laundry!

I only spent about $10 on the rod, cups, and hooks from IKEA, and about 15 minutes to install this.

level 3: renovation

Our upstairs bathroom is a tiny powder room but it’s right outside our bedroom so it’s where we brush our teeth and get ready in the morning and before bed. Because the vanity itself didn’t have usable storage (the drawers were broken and the large open cupboard had an odour from poorly done plumbing so we never wanted to put anything in it), everything piled up on the tiny countertop. Our electric toothbrushes, which needed to be plugged into the outlet but looked messy with long cords, our skincare products, our hairbrushes. I had designated some space for these items in the linen closet across the hall but we never seemed to put them “away.” And honestly, why would we? It doesn’t make sense to keep something you use twice a day in another room, it makes sense to keep it where you need it. We weren’t wrong for leaving our items in the bathroom - the bathroom design was wrong for not letting us do so in a better way.

So, when I redesigned the powder room I was very intentional. I chose a vanity that would allow Ryan and I to each have our own deep drawers to store all our regularly used products, and I installed an electrical outlet into the recessed medicine cabinet so that our toothbrushes would always be out of sight. Now I can genuinely say that the only items that live on our counter top (2 full months after the renovation is done) are the bottle of hand soap and the bottle of mouthwash we use every day. It doesn’t just look like this for Instagram photos - it genuinely looks like this all the time. And it’s not because we’re tidy people, it’s because the space was designed to work the way we needed it to work.

This was obviously the most expensive solution, but it was part of a renovation I was doing anyways. This vanity didn’t cost more than another one I would have purchased, I just had to be more critical when choosing it. And I would have likely installed a medicine cabinet anyways, so this just cost me about $25 more and some extra time to add the electrical outlet while I had the wall open anyways for lights.

The moral of the story? You are not the problem - bad design is the problem. So instead of trying to figure out why you can’t change a habit (when that habit actually kind of makes some sense) instead look for ways you can redesign something in your space to fix the root problem! And also, cut yourself some slack, it’s been a long month, a little mess is okay.