Walking on the UC Berkeley Campus, I saw this:

Hrm. That seems like an odd place to put a barrier. It’s not like there’s a cliff to fall over.

Another angle makes things a little more apparent:

Still don’t quite get it? How about this bird’s eye view, taken 3 years ago, from Kevin Fox’s “Berkeley Paths” photos (gallery no longer on line):

Look in the upper-middle-to-right-hand corner. See how there’s an asphalt path, heading from up-and-right to down-and-left, which is then continued by a dirt path, linking to the bend in the road??

Well, as this new photo demonstrates…

…that path is now gone. So, that barrier was designed to protect the grass.

In a presentation I gave a long time ago on emergent information architecture, I used the first birdseye photo to demonstrate how people will take a planned design and modify it to fit their needs. In the face of this, designers have two choices — allow the modification, or throw up obstacles (God forbid you digress from the original Vision!).

So, the landscape folk at Berkeley, in their foolishness, have chosen the latter. Not that it matters. People, being what they are, simply walk around it…

For shame!

There’s another interesting development. Look at the center of the first birdseye photo, and the bottom-right of the second. In the first, there’s a wide dirt path cutting across the corner. In the second, there’s a darker green patch, showing where it’s been re-sod.

For some reason, Berkeley would rather spend it’s money reinforcing it’s poor landscape architecture with barriers and re-sodding, then recognizing that the paths suggest a valuable will of the people.

Though, this is not always the case. In another part of the campus, diagonal concrete paths were laid where it was clear that people walked, and are still in use:

Pretty soon, Berkeley is going to have to face a new situation:

As you can see, a path is getting worn in across this field, crossing from the top-right to the bottom left (it continues paths already set in asphalt). Will Berkeley choose foolish fascism or opportunistic organicism? Time will tell…

Ramana Rao’s Information Flow. Ramana was at Xerox PARC, and is now at Inxight, and thinks a lot of smart thoughts about information, information visualization, etc. He’s begun a list of “49 Classics of Information Flow” which promises to be a tasty set of pointers.

Complexity Digest. A mix of super-academic and layperson-accessible links to articles on various subjects dealing with complexity, social networks, evolution, etc. etc.

Jeff and I are in San Antonio, TX, on a consulting gig. Yesterday after work, we went out for beers with the team we?re working with.

Jeff and I, being Bay Area liberals, had been careful to not open political conversations here in Dubya-land. But one of the team members asked about how people felt about the War in Iraq in the Bay Area, and we talked about the many protests, etc.

It quickly became clear that everyone around the table was against the administration?s policies, which kinda surprised me. I mean, we?re in Texas, working with a conservative financial services firm, and yet when going out for beers, I?m surrounded by liberals. (Who admonished Jeff and I to not voice our views TOO loudly, lest we raise the ire of the tables near us).

It seems to be a constant among people who do the kind of work we do (call it information architecture, user experience, etc.). They?re overwhelmingly liberal. And love good beer… We drank at Flying Saucer, which had over 80 beers on tap. Oh, and quote Simpson?s episodes at length.