Wear is honest usage data

Wear is a record of use; it builds up where people actually go, again and again, over years.

Examples:

• A stain above a hat peg, from a hat hung up wet for decades.
• A stair that creaks on the one spot everyone steps.
• A dirt path across a lawn where the sidewalk took the long way.

Physical wear has properties digital research lacks:

• Long horizon: Captures years of organic behavior, not an ad-hoc usability test.
• Unobserved: Records unselfconscious action.
• Hard to fake: Requires repetition over time.

Interviews tell you what people say. Wear shows what people did, but not why. A desire path across the lawn might mean the sidewalk was inefficient, dark, or inaccessible to a walker.

Software erases its own wear. Current telemetry measures engagement, but ignores the efficiency leaks that drain human time—forcing human friction out of sight. Digital desire paths exist entirely outside the app: screenshotting text to save for later, hoarding 80 open tabs as short-term memory, or exporting data to a softer, flexible tool, like a spreadsheet, just to edit a single column.

Physical spaces store history passively. Software demands cleanliness, erasing the traces that tell us how the system should evolve.

A desire path shows you where the sidewalk failed. Follow it.