I love this concept of the study of social distance, or how humans use space. Distinct from ergonomics, which is more about how people fit into their environment, proxemics focuses on the social aspect of space. For example: At what distance are you intimate? Where does your personal space end? How far away should you be for a good conversation? Why are the big circular wedding and conference tables so bad? How close should desks be in an office to encourage collaboration without feeling jammed together?

Dev Patnaik at Jump Associates used to give the fine example of how you will whisper politely and with awe in the vaulted ceilings of a cathedral, while the confessional box — for people to share their deepest secrets — is low and close. An olde English pub that you stoop to enter under the low ceiling immediately feels friendly and intimate, whereas you’ll struggle to have a deep conversation on entering a warehouse.

Proxemics was coined by the cultural anthropologist Edward Hall. His book The Hidden Dimension has the details.

Proxemics

Shares information passively, with the neat effect that having a good one in an office can go a long way to getting people on the same page without explicitly calling meetings or sending out updates to do so. Handy to also have a good space in front of it for talking, discussing and generally collaborating. A common term in agile development, originally I believe from Alistair Cockburn of Thoughtworks. To quote from his article, of many possible:

- Is large and easily visible to the casual, interested observer
- Is understood at a glance
- Changes periodically, so that it is worth visiting
- Is easily kept up to date”

The third teacher

A handy technique for communicating much of what you need about something.

Orthographic projection

Created by desire and use. Sometimes I find myself walking on the traces of one as a statement that ‘there ought to be a path here’ - voting with my feet.

There’s the classic, perhaps apocryphal, story of the architect who didn’t build any paths on a campus until people had worn them in, showing where the paths should be.

The phenomena has found use in technology with the phrase 'pave the cowpaths’.

One emergent behaviour-related concept arising from architecture and planning which has also found application in human-computer interaction is the idea of desire lines, desire paths or cowpaths. The usual current use of the term (often attributed, although apparently in error, to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964)) is to describe paths worn by pedestrians across spaces such as parks, between buildings or to avoid obstacles—“the foot-worn paths that sometimes appear in a landscape over time” (Mathes, 2004) and which become self-reinforcing as subsequent generations of pedestrians follow what becomes an obvious path. Throgmorton & Eckstein (2000) also discuss Chicago transportation engineers’ use of ‘desire lines’ to describe maps of straight-line origin-to-destination journeys across the city, in the process revealing assumptions about the public’s ‘desire’ to undertake these journeys. In either sense, desire lines (along with use-marks (Burns, 2007)) could perhaps, using economic terminology, be seen as a form of revealed user preference (Beshears et al, 2008) or at least revealed choice, with a substantial normative quality.

Architecture, urbanism, design and behaviour: a brief review, Dan Lockton, Sep 2011

Or see this very concrete example from UC Berkeley at peterme.com.

Desire path

Always good to share with friends and family your knowledge of doric columns, ionic columns or corinthian style classical columns when you spot them in the wild.

Sketchplanations tagged with architecture