Game-Changing

1. People ignore blank facades

Run even one Eye-Tracking study and this result will hit you on the head like a ton of bricks. Put it in red lights: People don’t tend to look at big blank things, or featur­e­less facades, or archi­tec­ture with four-sides of repe­ti­tive glass. Our brains, the work of 3.6 billion years of evolu­tion, aren’t set up for that. This is likely because big, blank, featur­e­less things rarely killed us. Or, put another way, our current modern archi­tec­ture simply hasn’t been around long enough to impact beha­viors and a central nervous system that’s deve­loped over millennia to ensure the species’ survival in the wild. From the brain’s visual perspec­tive, blank eleva­tions might as well not be there.

You can see this in the study above. It shows two views of NYC’s Stap­leton library, one with exis­ting windows, at right and, at left, one without them (a photo­shopped version we made of the same facade). The bright yellow dots repre­sent “fixa­tions” that show where eyes rest as they take in the scene in a 15-second interval; the lines between are the “saccades” that follow the move­ment between fixa­tions. On average, viewers moved their eyes 45 times per testing interval, with little to no conscious effort or aware­ness on their part, and no direc­tion on ours. In the image at left, without windows, test-takers more-or-less ignored the exte­rior, save for the doorway. This is not the case with the image at right. The photos below show heat maps which aggre­gate the viewing data of multiple indi­vi­duals. These maps, glowing brigh­test where people looked most, suggest how much fenestra­tion patterns matter: they keep people fixa­ting on the facade, provi­ding areas of contrast the eyes inna­tely seek and then stick to. Again and again, our studies found that buil­dings with punched windows (or symme­trical areas of high contrast) peren­ni­ally caught the eye, and those without, did not.

2. Fixations drives exploration

Why does it matter where people look without conscious control? That’s the ulti­mate ques­tion. In the course of our rese­arch, we picked up a cogni­tive science mantra, “fixa­tions drive explo­ra­tion,” and learned that uncon­scious hidden habits, such as where our eyes “fixate” without conscious input, deter­mines where our atten­tion goes and that’s hugely signi­fi­cant. Why? Because uncon­scious fixa­tions in turn direct conscious acti­vity and beha­vior. No wonder Honda and GM use this tech­no­logy. No wonder adver­ti­sers of all stripes do too. They want to know where we look so they can manage our beha­vior, making certain an ad grabs atten­tion as intended, before it’s released. They want to manage our uncon­scious beha­vior so they get the conscious outcome they desire from our brains, (without having to lift a meta­pho­rical finger!)

And what about archi­tec­ture?  

Eye Tracking can help us untangle the frac­tion-of-a-second expe­ri­ences that drive our actions around buil­dings in ways we may never realize. To see how our “fixa­tions drive explo­ra­tion,” let’s take the scene above; at left is Davis Square in Somer­ville, MA, a dense resi­den­tial district near Cambridge, home to many colleges and busi­nesses. At right, the image shows a photo­shopped version of the same scene. In the past year we’ve asked more than 300 people at lectures where they’d rather stand and wait for a friend: in front of the blank buil­ding or in front of the buil­ding with the colorful Matisse-like mural. Amazingly—without even talking with one another—everyone picked the same place, stan­ding in front of the mural.  

Why?

Turns out eye tracking suggests some inte­res­ting answers. The heat map above indi­cates that the mural provides fixa­tion points to focus on; these give us a type of attach­ment we like and seem to need to feel at our best; without these connec­tions people appar­ently don’t know where to go—they get anxious—and so won’t select the blanker site. Amazing the power of fixa­tions to drive explo­ra­tion whether in ads or archi­tec­ture. (I guess it has to be this way since we only have one brain.)

3. People look for people, continually

And finally, ironi­cally, the most important thing Eye Tracking studies of archi­tec­ture reve­aled to us had nothing to do with buil­dings at all. Instead it suggested how much our brain is hard­wired to look for and see people. We’re a social species and our percep­tion is rela­tional. In other words, it’s speci­fi­cally desi­gned to take in others. Eye-tracking studies bear this out, repea­tedly. Yes, archi­tec­ture matters, but from our brain’s perspec­tive, people matter more. No matter where they are.

We saw this eye tracking Boston’s famous Copley Square with its historic Trinity Church (c. 1877) and equally historic Hancock Tower (c.1976), which recently changed hands and is now called 200 Clarendon (see images above). In 2015, the tower featured a tempo­rary art instal­la­tion of a man stan­ding on a floa­ting barge. Guess where people looked?

If you chose the small silhou­ette of the guy, you’re right. Richard­so­nian Roma­nesque has its appeal, and there may be die-hard moder­nists out there, but when it comes to human bodies, that’s what your brain wants you to focus on. (See reddest heat map.) That’s where people went to look; other­wise, they barely gave the glass buil­ding a glance; it simply can’t provide fodder for focus from a brain’s 3.6 billion-year-old perspec­tive.

If there’s one all-encom­pas­sing conclu­sion, it’s this: we can only hope to save ourselves if we know what we are. Evolu­tion is real and we’re arti­facts of the process. Eye-tracking archi­tec­ture shows ancient algo­rithms direc­ting us even though we can’t perceive them. Archi­tec­ture that’s humane engages our animal nature acknow­led­ging our remar­kable history. In terms of how we take in the world, our ances­tors learned the hard way to imme­dia­tely look for areas of high contrast and other crea­tures, parti­cu­larly faces, and they passed the life-saving traits on to us. These beha­viors will not go away soon.

So we find ourselves today, modern man, riveted to looking at the silhou­ette of someone outside the 35th floor of a high-rise. It truly makes no sense, unless you consider where we came from and the struggle for survival that made us.