The Genetics of Design

In 1980, the psychologist Peter Thompson from the University of York published a one-page paper in the journal Perception, entitled “Margaret Thatcher: A new illusion.” In it he noted how psychologists know people struggle to read expressions on upside down faces; so what would happen if a right-side up mouth and eyes were put on an inverted face? Thompson did some cutting and pasting of an official portrait of the infamous Maggie Thatcher to find out – and you can see what happens below:  Check out photos in the top row.

With her face upside down, Maggie’s expressions look different but not exceptionally so; but, right-side up, in the row below, the viewer’s in for a shock: “We’ve been cruelly deceived by the smiling Mrs. Thatcher,” Thompson wrote wryly, referring to the image on the lower right which is both captivating and, well, terrifying.

So what’s happening? Your brain expects to see and is hard-wired to read faces right-side up.  As a very social species, we are built first-and-foremost to be face-i-tects. Our very survival depended and still depends on it.  “The Thatcher Illusion” as this quick experiment became called, not only demonstrates our upright-face bias but our hard-wiring for instantly reading their expressive emotional contents. It turns out there are cells in our brain (called face patches) specialized for reading facial expression that go on high alert when eyes and/or mouth distort.  All this with no conscious input on our part.  It all happens too quickly for our conscious selves to get into the act.

Check out the image below and you can see the impact these face-patches have on how we pay attention. Here we took the Thatcherized face images and watched 24 test subjects look at them for 15 seconds on a computer screen equipped with an eye-tracker.  Eye-tracking analysis creates ‘heat maps’ which glow reddest where people look most, fading to yellow and then green where they look least.

With no prompting on our part, we saw test subjects repeatedly go back to look at the most distorted face, the one the face patches determined was most distorted – the lower right – 190 times in the 15-second testing interval; more than on any other image. (It’s why it’s the reddest!)

So what’s this have to do with architecture?  We know a building from a person, obviously – however we look at a building with a brain specialized for taking in people, and we can never change this.  We don’t put in a different brain when we go outside for an urban stroll or go on a trip to check out the Taj Mahal.  We do it all with the only brain we have, that of a hyper-specialized face-i-tect.

What this means for buildings, and why it’s wise to create ones that fit our ‘unconscious’ predispostions, will be explored more, of course, in further posts.

by Ann

Thanks to the Institue for Human-Centered Design (humancentereddesign.org) and Wheelhouse at the Bradford Mill for providing laboratory space and study volunteers.

 

We’re thrilled to announce Planning Magazine, the flagship publication of the American Planning Association (APA), made our article their cover story this month. The story’s below, here’s how they introduced it:

“This month’s Planning Magazine probes below the surface with an intriguing cover story on planning for the subconscious. Authors Ann Sussman and Janice Ward explain how data obtained from eye tracking and other biometric technologies can help planners shape built environments that are interesting, pleasing, and informative for their human inhabitants.”

Planning for the Subconscious
Using eye tracking and other biometric tools to better understand ourselves.
By Ann Sussman, AIA, and Janice M. Ward

‘The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.’  —Steve Jobs

The world is entering a new era of cognitive science that allows us to understand human behavior better than ever before. In fact, the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development recently labelled the 21st century the “Age of Biology,” noting the growing impacts of the ongoing life-science revolution, which the group predicts will change economies, create new technologies, and broadly reshape our lives.

For planning, this new age means we can record how people see and feel about their surroundings, not as machines, but as animals keen on connection and ruled by anxieties. Imagine being able to collect real-world, real-time data about emotional habits in the built environment and to definitively answer perennial questions such as why people enjoy walking through miles of a dense urban settings like Manhattan but consistently shun barren landscapes like Boston’s infamously empty City Hall Plaza.

Today it’s possible. With affordable new tools, we can track subconscious predispositions and use metrics to explain the human response to an existing development or predict responses to a new development. Planning will become trackable and quantifiable in ways unimaginable in the 20th century.

Read the full story.

Ann and I would like to thank the Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD) in Boston for hosting our study and volunteers there and at the Wheelhouse at the Bradford Mill in Concord for participating in it.  We also thank the editors of Planning Magazine and the other researchers mentioned in the article  for their interest and contributions.

Sincerely,
Janice M. Ward and Ann Sussman

After eye tracking a photo of the young man below, we saw how compelling a face could be. Within 3/10 of a second, the 33 people in our pilot study focused on his eyes and mouth. They proceeded to go back and look at these features 666 times in the 15-second testing interval. The ‘heat map’ below reveals the trail their eyes made, glowing reddest where they looked most.

This facial bias, which is hard-wired in us, is not lost on product designers. Car makers are familiar with it, knowing that a majority of their customers ‘bond’ to a car’s front end, sealing deals because of emotional attachments made to an automobile’s ‘face.’ Computer folks know it too. The graphic below cites stats from Amazon, the world’s leading bookseller today.

Keen on market domination, Amazon has developed its branding around the face. You can see the impact playing out in a row of gift cards at a CVS (below left). It’s hard for Bed Bath and Beyond and other retailers to compete with Amazon’s smiley logo. It simply grabs our attention in crowded racks because it’s meant to, with Amazon smartly leveraging 3.8 billion years of our evolutionary history. They’re betting that our affinity for faces, which insured our survival over eons, can’t help but ensure theirs.

Also intent on maintaining its dominance, Amazon uses a version of the smile for its logo too, in its packaging tape (above right), exploiting the science that explains when we see a smile, we unconsciously feel happy. Part of us will feel good, and readily attach and reach out for that cardboard box even before we open it—even if it’s destined for someone else!

And Amazon’s not alone in exploiting our biological heritage, as a glance at other firms’ logos reveals. Here we see that businesses as diverse as crayon manufacturers, food purveyors and radio stations use the same facial feature to snag us.

So the next time you’re creating marketing material, flyers or websites, consider the pattern we’re not only wired to see first, but also feel happiest about.

When Justin Hollander and I were thinking about cover designs for the first edition of our book, Cognitive Architecture (Routledge, 2015), we felt a face had to be on it, even though it was a book meant for architects and planners. “No buildings,” we said, “It has to have a face.”

The cover we ended up with is below (left). We eye tracked it last year, and learned that viewers did indeed look at its faces first, going back to check them out repeatedly. The time to first fixation (TTFF) on the faces was less than a second, and our twenty-four test subjects refocused on them 361 times in a 15-second testing interval. At the end of the day, we conclude, it seems best not to try to fool Mother Nature, but rather work with the plans she’s already laid in place.

Writer: Ann Sussman
Editor: Janice M. Ward

The Boston Globe took note of our eye-tracking study this Sunday in an IDEAS article. Follow this link or read the article below.

The design of Boston City Hall is a charged topic. Some people love it, others hate it, and for those who fall into the latter category, local architect Ann Sussman thinks she knows why.

“Biologists describe people as wall-hugging, which explains why they avoid City Hall Plaza,” says Sussman, author of the book “Cognitive Architecture” and a resident of Concord. “The edges are too hard [to find], and your subconscious, which is guiding you, says don’t go there.”

The idea that we have hard-wired biological responses to the built environment is increasingly popular. Architects hope that by figuring out how to measure and decode these responses, they can learn to design buildings that function better and more effectively flatter our ingrown aesthetic sensibilities.

“The body is constantly communicating in ways we’re not fully understanding right now,” says Mark Collins,codirector of the Columbia University GSAPP Cloud Lab. “What everybody is interested in is tapping into the senses and getting this incredibly rich, detailed, but sometimes incomprehensible signal that comes out.”

At the moment, architects and their neuroscientist collaborators have a few “biosensing” techniques they can use to evaluate how people react to places. These include measuring galvanic skin response, monitoring brain waves with an EEG, and eye-tracking, in which a wearable device lets researchers record how people’s eyes move around a space. Sussman recently conducted one such study, a small-scale experiment in which she and her collaborators at Boston’s Institute of Human-Centered Design had 33 volunteers look at a computer monitor outfitted with an eye-tracker as it displayed images of iconic Boston places like Trinity Church, City Hall, and Copley Square. Based on the eye-tracking data, the team created heat maps of the images, which glow brighter in places where people look the most and settle their gazes.

The results were not altogether surprising. People tended to fixate on areas of high contrast, like a doorway, and on other people (especially faces), like the portrait of Mayor John Collins on the side of City Hall and a pair of statues flanking the entrance to Trinity Church. Participants were also attracted to a black and white vinyl mural of a man on a raft installed last fall between the 44th and 50th floors of 200 Clarendon St.

“You can see how Boston Properties would be interested [in this kind of work]. It was smart to put up the art installation. It was one area where people looked most whether they consciously intended to or not,” Sussman says.

It’s tantalizing to think that we might be able to figure out exactly what people like in a building. Marketers, after all, have been deploying similar approaches for years to better capture consumers’ attention. But experts in the field caution that it still has a long way to go to become useful.

“I would like to see the enthusiasm for these new tools tempered just a little because my fear is that they won’t live up to their early promise if we over interpret the findings,” says Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist and design consultant at the University of Waterloo.

So far, researchers have experimented with a few different applications. A pilot project out of the GSAPP Cloud Lab at Columbia recently used eye-tracking to investigate how best to historically preserve the Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo. The aim was to identify the features of the building architects really focused on in order to prioritize interior and exterior elements for preservation. Another study, run by Ellard, monitored how people react to the plain exteriors of warehouses. The idea was to assess whether a few simple design flourishes could go a long way to boosting the visual appeal of the facades. Ellard found evidence that might be the case.

“One of the things we know for sure is the visual complexity of a facade has an effect on people’s emotional reaction to it,” he says. “Eye-tracking might be able to tell us whether those subtleties in a facade do capture people’s attention, whether they have a mitigating effect on the general story that low facade complexity is not a good thing.”

All of these insights might have been arrived at through intuition, or even by way of less sophisticated forms of technology. For now, biosensing is an intriguing but still limited tool in architecture — one that can be used as a cudgel in arguments about the design of City Hall, but which one day might help architects design buildings more in tune with the people who will use them.

Kevin Hartnett is a writer in South Carolina. He can be reached at kshartnett18@gmail.com.

 

When we look at buildings, what do we see first? What attracts us most? What grabs our attention?

Last month, we began a pilot study exploring these questions at Boston’s Institute of Human Centered Design (IHCD) using an off-the-shelf ‘eye-tracker’ combined with data analysis software.

Eye tracking technology lets you see how people look at their world and records where they unconsciously focus. Product designers and marketers already use this and other bio-sensing or monitoring tools to find out which products consumers will likely buy based on their viewing preferences.

In our preliminary study, more than 30 volunteers looked at over 60 images of the built environment. What would our eyes be naturally drawn to without conscious control?

 This photo shows the eye-tracking test environment at IHCD. The study volunteer (on the left) views photos on her monitor while an IHCD staff member watches the test computer with eye-tracking analysis software installed.

Below are a few of the test results from Copley Place, one of Boston’s famed public spaces. The photos show Trinity Church (1877, by HH Richardson), a famed Romanesque building next to IM Pei’s landmark skyscraper, today called 200 Clarendon (formerly the Hancock Tower) built in 1976.

The ‘heat maps’ glow bright red where volunteers looked the most and fade to green where they looked less.

The images suggest that people are really drawn to:

• Other people including the art installation of a man on a raft on the 200 Clarendon Tower, and
• Areas of contrast, such as the front elevation of Trinity Church.

The following ‘spotlight’ image, in black and white, shows the same thing as the ‘heat map’ with bright areas indicating intensity of interest.

The data term TTFF means Time to First Fixation; it shows how people tended to look at nineteenth century Trinity Church first, and the mid-20th-century Hancock Tower second and third. They then fixated on the tower’s art installation 191 times in the 15-second viewing interval, going back to look at it on average close to four times!

Our study’s preliminary conclusion?  People love looking at people, not unlike what architect Jan Gehl is famous for saying, quoting 1000-year-old ancient Norse poetry, “Man’s greatest joy is man.”  Given that we’re a social species, it does stand to reason.

Stay tuned for more data and photos – coming soon!

Ann
Editor: Janice M. Ward

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Thanks to Boston’s Institute for Human Centered Design (humancentereddesign.org) for generously providing the lab space and expert staff to help run these studies.