Game-Changing

Eye-Tracking Studies Reveal
How We Actually See Architecture

Form follows function

While many archi­tects have long clung to the old “form follows func­tion” adage, form follows brain func­tion might be the motto of today’s adver­ti­sers and auto­ma­kers, who incre­asingly use high-tech tools to under­stand hidden human beha­viors, and then design their products to meet them (without ever asking our permis­sion!)

Biome­tric tools like an EEG (elec­troen­ce­pha­logram) which measures brain waves; facial expres­sion analysis soft­ware that follows our chan­ging expres­sions; and eye-tracking, which allows us to record “uncon­scious” eye move­ments, are ubiqui­tous in all kinds of adver­ti­sing and product deve­lo­p­ment today—beyond the psycho­logy or medical depart­ments where you might expect to see them. These days you’ll also find them installed at the beha­vi­oral rese­arch and user expe­ri­ence labs in busi­ness schools such as American Univer­sity in D.C. and Worcester Poly­technic Insti­tute (WPI) in Massa­chu­setts.

What happens when you apply a biome­tric measure like Eye-Tracking to archi­tec­ture? More than we expected…

Indeed, after running four pilot-studies looking at buil­dings in both city and suburb (New York City, Boston, Somer­ville and Devens, MA) since 2015, we think these tech­no­lo­gies stand to revo­lu­tio­nize our under­stan­ding of how archi­tec­ture impacts people and, in a first, allow us to predict human responses, inclu­ding things like whether people will want to linger outside a new buil­ding or, within frac­tions of a second, choose to flee. (There’s more on our first Eye-Tracking study in the cover story of Plan­ning Maga­zine, June, 2016.)

In sum, we believe once you “see” how we look at buil­dings, you’ll never look at archi­tec­ture the same way again. So, here are three unex­pected findings gathered from Eye-Tracking archi­tec­ture:

Author of text

Photographs

Ann Sussman

Thanks to

  • Common Edge, the original place this article appears
  • Boston’s Insti­tute for Human-Centered Design
  • The Devens Enter­prise Commis­sion
  • Prof Justin B. Hollander and Hanna Carr ‘20, Tufts Univer­sity as a contri­bu­ting rese­ar­cher. His rese­arch and funding allowed two of the studies (NYC + Devens) to proceed
  • Dan Bartman, City of Somer­ville Plan­ning Depart­ment for inva­luable assis­tance and rese­arch support
  • For game-chan­ging tech­no­lo­gical tools many thanks to iMotions and 3M VAS and their staff for making this type of rese­arch possible.
  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.

  1. 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.)

  1. 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.

Ann Sussman
is an author, archi­tect and biome­tric rese­ar­cher. Her book Cogni­tive Archi­tec­ture, Desig­ning for How We Respond to the Built Envi­ron­ment (2015), co-authored with Justin B Hollander, won the EDRA award for rese­arch in 2016. More info at: annsussman.com and her blog, geneticsofdesign.com.

FIVE ANSWERS
  1. Please tell us about your top 5 sports faci­li­ties.
    There’s one sports arena that’s been part of my life forever: The Roman Colos­seum!  My mom found a print of it by Pira­nesi when I was a kid and we lived in Europe; it came back with us to the United States where she placed it in the living room; today that same print adorns my dining room. Answe­ring these ques­tions made me realize for the first time that a 2,000-year-old amphi­theater is the one buil­ding I’ve been looking at most of my life!
  2. Which archi­tects and buil­dings have left a lasting impres­sion on you? Why?
    The other buil­ding that defi­ni­tely left a lasting impres­sion on my brain is Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, or Villa Capra in Vicenza Italy. I fell in love with it in when first studying archi­tec­ture. I even took Palladio’s plans to a local baker when I got married for the design of my wedding cake! This buil­ding influenced the design of count­less other buil­dings around the world, inclu­ding in the U.S., The White House. And the Palla­dian facade of the American President’s home is today on U.S. currency (every $20 bill). I couldn’t under­stand why a country estate desi­gned for a wealthy, reti­ring Vatican cleric in the 16th century (a party pavi­lion !) could come to repre­sent American demo­cracy! So we eye tracked the villa — and got an intri­guing answer: In pre-atten­tive proces­sing (the first 3–5 seconds you look at some­thing) the villa suggests a face!  And because of our brain’s mamma­lian attach­ment wiring, no other image can grab us like that — and no other pattern ever will.
  3. What and whom do you consider as industry trends and trend­set­ters?
    Key industry trends in archi­tec­ture include the drive to sustaina­bi­lity, desig­ning to promote human health and well­ness and new findings in cogni­tive science which help us under­stand what our brain is set up to see. For more infor­ma­tion on the latter, please see our website: geneticsofdesign.com.
  4. What book should archi­tects in this industry abso­lutely read?
    I’d have to recom­mend the one I co-authored with Tufts Univer­sity professor Justin B. Hollander, Cogni­tive Archi­tec­ture, Desig­ning for How We Respond to the Built Envi­ron­ment (Rutledge, 2015), and one by a Nobel-prize winning neuro­sci­en­tist on why art works: Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight (2012). There’s also a good little book on the brain by Oxford Univer­sity Press: The Brain: A Very Short Intro­duc­tion, by Michael O’Shea.
  5. What is/was your favo­rite song to listen to while desig­ning?
    Favo­rite song to listen to while writing or meeting with others to discuss rese­arch ideas would have to be the buzz of a local cafe; the murmur of people talking and the clin­king of the coffee cups is somehow very soot­hing and gets me to think at my best.

Janice M. Ward 
is a writer, desi­gner, blogger and STEM advo­cate. She and Ann Sussman co-authored the cover story in Plan­ning Magazine’s 2016 June issue: using eye tracking and other biome­tric tools to help plan­ners shape built envi­ron­ments. More info at acanthi.com and geneticsofdesign.com.

FIVE ANSWERS
  1. Please tell us about your top 5 sports faci­li­ties.
    As a native Bosto­nian I’m drawn to Fenway Park, which is listed as one of the 10 Most Historic North American Stadiums. It’s the local, senti­mental favo­rite. 
  2. Which archi­tects and buil­dings have left a lasting impres­sion on you? Why?
    For our 20th anni­ver­sary, my husband and I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water. Breath­ta­king. Not comfy by today’s stan­dards, but amazing. Imagine a 5300 square foot house built over a water­fall complete with internal green­house and stairs leading down to the stream below.
  3. What and whom do you consider as industry trends and trend­set­ters?
    Archi­tec­ture should keep up with changes in tech­no­logy. Not just buil­ding tech­no­logy. Design schools should inte­grate Science, Tech­no­logy, Engi­nee­ring, Math (STEM) initia­tives inclu­ding neuro­sci­ence, biology, computer science and biome­tric tools to develop people-centric, data-driven envi­ron­ments.
  4. What book should archi­tects in this industry abso­lutely read?
    Tech­no­logy moves so fast, I tend to read online content in websites, blogs and magazines. Two favo­rites are Archi­tec­tural Recordand Dwell. The book I am curr­ently enjoying is “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Commu­ni­cate” by Peter Wohl­leben.
  5. What is/was your favo­rite song to listen to while desig­ning?
    While writing, I often listen to Bach, Eliot Fisk or Andre Segovia. Gentle, instru­mental music inspires without distrac­tion.
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