ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is how in today’s bio-tech times, we can get hard data on unconscious human behaviors that direct our experience of the built environment. These biometric tools let us ‘see’ who we are, revealing our ‘unseen’ visceral and psychological experience, which, in turn, changes our understanding of how architecture impacts people, giving designers and planners new terms to describe the human experience, new ways to assess projects before they’re built, and even new metrics for determining how and what to build in the first place. We can now get the facts on how edges, patterns, shapes, biophilic elements mentioned in earlier chapters impact us, and the way adjusting them immediately changes our responses, allowing us to predict whether a new environment will soothe or stress, prove inviting or repel. The chapter focuses on eye tracking, which reveals unconscious and conscious eye movements, and includes more than two dozen full-color images from eye-tracking architecture studies, revealing its power to elucidate the human experience of the built environment.
