The 2nd International Urban Experience + Design Conference took place at Tufts on Friday, April 28th – a day-long event, open to all. Here’s the conference flyer, featuring a heat map that glows brightest where eyes rest most taking in the scene;
The conference was co-sponsored by theHapi.org, (the Human Architecture + Planning Institute), a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research.
Full of energy and great ideas, the video here captures some of the energy in the room: https://youtu.be/gUsbkMwiJuE
These studies are sponsored by theHapi.org (the Human Architecture + Planning Institute) a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research.
Anyone with a laptop or PC with webcam can take part; on a Mac, link to it from Google Chrome or Firefox (and it’s best to do so in a quiet space with minimal distraction.)
Once on site, the link directs you to eye-tracking calibration slides – where you simply focus on a shape as it moves across the screen – before image viewing begins. Each study concludes with a brief series of calibration slides, and takes a minute-or-two to upload your data.
And thank you for your participation; with your help we hope to improve understanding of how people experience the public realm!
These studies are sponsored by theHapi.org (the Human Architecture + Planning Institute) a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research.
Your participation helps expand our understanding of how humans respond to the built environment and what we most need to see to be at our best.
Anyone with a laptop or PC with webcam can take part; on a Mac, link to it from Google Chrome or Firefox (and it’s best to do so in a quiet space with minimal distraction.)
Once on site, the link directs you to eye-tracking calibration slides – where you simply focus on a shape as it moves across the screen – before image viewing begins. Each study concludes with a brief series of calibration slides, and takes a minute-or-two to upload your data.
And thank you for your participation; with your help we hope to have results out next month!
These studies use state-of-the-art software from iMotions.com, a global purveyor of biometric tools for human behavioral research. They are sponsored by theHapi.org (the Human Architecture + Planning Institute) a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research.
They can help give us important understanding of how humans evolved to take in our world – key understandings to have to build better places for people.
All studies out for analysis now; results should come in soon!
The talk reviews key biometric tools, including eye tracking and facial expression analysis, that provide ‘a new lens’ to understand the human experience of place and transform our understanding of what people need to see to be at their best.
These Studies use state-of-the-art eye-tracking and facial-expression-analysis software from iMotions.com, a global purveyor of biometric tools for human behavioral research. Once on site, the studies direct you to eye-tracking calibration slides – where you simply focus on a shape as it moves across the screen – before image viewing begins. Studies takes about 4 minutes in total, and conclude with a brief series of calibration slides. It then takes a minute-or-two to upload your collected data.
This research is sponsored by theHapi.org, a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, email: contact (at) theHapi.org.
We’re analyzing BuildingStudy-#2, a biometric building study revealing how we really take in buildings!
Results should be out later this month –
These studies use state-of-the-art eye-tracking and facial-expression-analysis software from iMotions.com, a global purveyor of biometric tools for human behavioral research. Once on site, the studies direct you to eye-tracking calibration slides – where you simply focus on a shape as it moves across the screen – before image viewing begins. Studies takes about 4 minutes in total, and conclude with a brief series of calibration slides. It then takes a minute-or-two to upload your collected data.
The BuildingStudies are sponsored by theHapi.org, a nonprofit dedicated to understanding the human experience of the built environment and improving its design through education and research. Feel free to reach out if you have questions, email: contact (at) theHapi.org
Eye tracking creates heatmaps that glow reddest where people look most
The results are in for Study #1: Eye Tracking Public Architecture. How do people look at these buildings? What immediately draws their eye? Do some buildings make people feel happy and others less so? How does architecture enhance or degrade the public realm?
Researchers at theHapi.org ask these kinds of questions and use state-of-the-art biometric tools to help answer them. This summer, as part of a study funded by theNational Civic Art Society, the nonprofit invited participants to take part in a series of studies using iMotions-online eye-tracking software, to learn how we actually look at buildings, exploring both our conscious and non-conscious, or subliminal behavior.
BuildingStudy#1 used images from a 2020 Harris Poll, originally put together by the National Civic Art Society (NCAS), which paired traditional and modern civic buildings and asked: “Which of these two buildings would you prefer for a U.S. courthouse or federal office building?”
Over 2,000 Americans took part in the poll, conducted online, and the answer came back that nearly three-quarters of participants (72%), across political, gender and socio-economic lines, preferred traditional architecture for U.S. courthouses and federal office buildings. Could the survey possibly reflect biological biases that are hardwired in us – as innate as our need for water and air?
For the biometric study of the Harris Poll, also conducted online, using iMotions software, 62 participants looked at the same images on laptops, using web-cams to follow their eye movements taking in each scene on screen in brief, 12-second, intervals.
Here are the findings – the original study images appear first with the colorful eye-tracking results below them:
Pair #1
Top left, the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in Washington D.C., paired with the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, also in Washington D.C.; heatmaps of both buildings, below
Eye-tracking data is collected and aggregated to form heatmaps which glow reddest where people look most, and fade to yellow, then green, and finally, no color at all, in areas ignored. Note above how the reddest and largest heatmap falls on the traditional building, the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, (EPA headquarters) in Washington DC (at right). The modern, Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, at left, also in Washington DC (HUD headquarters), did not draw the eye the same way; people barely focused on any of it.
And that was the remarkable, and remarkably consistent, finding this eye-tracking pilot-study revealed; no matter where the buildings were in the U.S., traditional civic architecture consistently drew viewer attention and focus while modern-style counterparts did not.
For instance, in the pair below, the Howard M. Metzenbaum U.S. Courthouse (at right) in Cleveland, Ohio, clearly captured attention; we see how much of the building’s facade glows bright red. While, in contrast, the Sandra Day O’Connor U.S. Courthouse, in Phoenix, Arizona, (at left) barely has any strong red hotspots.
Pair #3
Top left, the Sandra Day O’Connor in Phoenix, Arizona, with the Howard M. Metzenbaum U.S. Courthouse, at right, in Cleveland, Ohio; heat maps of both buildings, below.
The same thing happens with the U.S. Courthouse in Toledo, Ohio, below left, and its modern counterpart, the Hansen Federal Building, at right,in Ogden, Utah:
Pair #4
Top left, the U.S. Courthouse in Toledo, Ohio, paired with the Hansen Federal Building, in Ogden Utah, at right; heat maps of both buildings. below.
Even more so! Note how the modern-style building barely generates a single red dot; this indicates the brain did not direct people to focus on it, and they didn’t! With its repetitive parallel lines, it is systematically ignored and always will be.
These kinds of eye-tracking studies matter and suggest how biometric tools are critical not only for advertising but for assessing architecture – because they show how the human response to visual stimuli happens. Design is about interaction, and with biometrics, we literally ‘see’ how the interaction starts and how different cues prompt very different results. These studies let us piece together and predict behavior in the built environment and help us understand the 2020 Harris Poll findings too.
We can theorize that people tended to favor the civic buildings they most easily could look at; people tended not to favor buildings that didn’t draw their eye and that they could not readily focus or fixate on.
“When you know the mechanism, you can use that understanding in countless ways to drastically improve the human condition,” notes author and MD, Nadine Burke Harris. “That is how you spark a revolution. You shift the frame, you change the lens, and all at once the world is revealed, and nothing is the same.” (The Deepest Well, 2018)
Indeed, this is what we can now do in our time, known as a new Age of Biology, by understanding ourselves better, honor innate human predispositions that acknowledge our subliminal need to connect to our surroundings, and in so doing build better places for people. For in the end, making urban spaces and places that both respect and reflect our biology will make for a happier and healthier public realm. What could be a better goal for our time?
After all, as Francis Bacon, the reknown 17th-century English philosopher, noted:
‘We cannot command nature except by obeying her.’
Isn’t it time to follow the wisdom?
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Here are the four remaining eye-tracked Harris Poll results:
Pair #5 compared the Frank M. Scarlett Federal Building, in Brunswich, Georgia, at left, with the U.S. Court House, in Waco, Texas, right.
Pair #6 paired the Martin V. B. Bostetter, Jr. U.S. Court House, in Alexandria, Virginia, at left, with the U.S. Courthouse in Newport New, Virginia, at right.
Pair #2 displayed the National Archives Building, in Washington DC, at left with the Hubert H. Humphrey Building (HHS HQ), also in Washington DC, at right.
Pair #7 showed the Gene Snyder U.S. Courthouse and Custom House, in Louisville, Kentucky, at left, and the Hammond Federal Courthouse, in Hammond, Indiana, at right.
On April 28, 2023, Tufts University and the Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc (theHapi.org) will host the 2nd International Conference on Urban Experience + Design: Ux+Design/2023. Researchers, scholars, architects, planners, designers and students, are all invited to submit proposals for presentations. The conference will take place at Tufts University, located just outside Boston, Massachusetts, and builds on the success of The 1st International Conference on Urban Experience and Design in 2019.
Speakers will explore the implications of ‘embodied cognition’, cognitive architecture, biology, and evolution, as well as new research methods and techniques for using biometrics in urban planning, architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture. The first Ux+Design/2019 conference attracted speakers from across the globe and papers were published in the 2021 book: Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm.
Today, the design professions and their academic counterparts find themselves in the midst of a historic transition, which in a first, provides a scientific foundation for their disciplines. Neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology, coupled with powerful new biometric tools able to measure the human experience of place, provide new information and methods for understanding, creating and assessing architecture and urban spaces.
This conference will bring together creative thinkers from around the world who are advancing knowledge in these areas, helping to shape a new kind of design practice, one that embraces the unconscious responses we have to external stimuli and is evidence-based.
We welcome proposal submissions (abstracts between 200-350 words) that succinctly explain the specific problem you are exploring, the questions you are asking in your research, methods, data, results, and implications for urban experience and design theory and practice. Include your name, email address, and present affiliation. Abstracts are due October 24, 2022. Notifications will be made on November 1, 2022 and 15-20 page papers will be due by March 15, 2023.
Email abstracts to: Prof. Justin Hollander, justin.hollander(at)tufts.edu.
Anyone with a laptop or PC with webcam can sign in; on a Mac, link to it from Google Chrome or Firefox (and it’s best to do so in a quiet space with minimal distraction.)
Here are the links – check them out before we take them down:
Building Study #1: (taken down 8/4/2022; results out!)
These studies use state-of-the-art eye-tracking and facial-expression-analysis software from iMotions.com, a global purveyor of biometric tools for human behavioral research. Once on site, the studies first direct you to eye-tracking calibration slides – where you simply focus on a shape as it moves across the screen – before image viewing begins; the studies take about 3-to-4 minutes each. Each also concludes with a brief series of calibration slides. And then takes a minute-or-two to upload data collected.
theHapi.org hopes to be able to share results next month; And feel free to reach out if you have any questions or other concerns; email: contact@theHapi.org
More info on these biometric Building Studies, sponsored by theHapi.org and GeneticsofDesign.com, here:
The Genetics of Design 