A line of our own drawing

An 8 by 12 metre print infographic on desire paths in Singapore, commissioned by The Everyday Museum of the Singapore Art Museum.

Singapore Art Museum

Partner:

Singapore Art Museum

Project type:

Infographic

Scope:

Editorial writing
Data visualisation
Social media
Research

See it live

Singapore is a city of planned walkways. Shelters, pavements, and pedestrian bridges are placed with intent, and the act of walking is shaped and controlled by design. Yet desire paths still appear. These are the informal tracks worn into grass and dirt by feet that chose a different route. They are small acts of disorder, and sometimes of democracy, in a city built for order.

About the project

A large-format print infographic commissioned by The Everyday Museum by Singapore Art Museum, responding to artist Tan Pin Pin's installation walk walk (Singapore Deviation version). The work reflects on desire paths across four districts in Singapore, and what they reveal about how people move through a highly planned city. The final piece was installed outside SAM's Level 1 galleries at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.

The challenge

Making data out of something unmapped

Desire paths are by definition unofficial. They are not in planning databases or transport records, and there is no dataset to pull. Building the work meant generating the material ourselves, through fieldwork across four different parts of Singapore. The research had to be rigorous enough to carry a piece of this scale, while staying true to the informal nature of what we were documenting.

A data piece that had to work as art

The commission was for an artwork, not an infographic for a report. It had to sit in a museum, respond to another artist's installation, and hold up to close reading by visitors who were not there for data. That meant resisting the cleanness of commercial visualisation and finding a visual language that reflected the subject itself: walking, curiosity, informal lines drawn across a city.

Our creative solution

We built the data through fieldwork. Six team members based in Singapore walked four districts over two weeks: Bedok North in the residential heartlands, the Central Business District, the Railway Corridor, and the industrial stretch around Jalan Terusan. Each site was chosen for its distinct character. Before walking, we agreed on a shared observation framework so the documentation could be compared across sites, but left the methods of recording open. Some of us used Strava, some Google Street View, some notebooks, some photos. A shared Felt map let us annotate paths as we found them.

From the fieldwork, we grouped the paths we found into five categories based on the behaviours they seemed to reflect: paths of escapism, impatient paths, paths to don't-know-where, paths of common sense, and paths of freedom. Some categories confirmed our hypotheses. Others surprised us. In Bedok North, we found "paths of common sense" that were more practical than the official routes, suggesting residents were filling gaps in planning rather than acting against it.

For the art direction, we moved away from the clean language of commercial infographics. The final piece uses a sketchy, dynamic, and colourful style inspired by scrapbooks and travel journals. Maps and photographs of the paths are interspersed with the team's reflections and speculations, so the work reads as a record of a group walking and thinking together rather than a neutral overview. We added flipboards to a few selected paths, which visitors can open to see photos and satellite images, and use to find the paths themselves.

Our partners

The Everyday Museum is a public art initiative by Singapore Art Museum that commissions diverse art projects and programmes to create physical and virtual nodes for engagement and interaction, shaping cultural spaces for and with communities.

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