Eye-Tracking Architects: Investigating Design Intentions In Plan Drawings

Architects have a long tradition of communicating design ideas visually by embedding them in representations such as sketches and drawings. With the advances in physiological recording devices such as eye trackers, architects have obtained another means of exploring how their vision works when performing design tasks, and discovering how their eye movements reflect creative design thinking. In this paper we investigated architects’ eye movements during design intention retrieval by examining existing studies of eye-tracking in architecture and proposing two new types which were observed in early scientific explorations and architectural writings. Finally, we devised a tool to visualize eye movements when architects observe design sketches by Palladio and Le Corbusier, and analyzed gaze directions and foveal vision clusters from our custom calibrated eye-tracking tool. Our evidence of two types of eye movements suggested that distinctive eye movement patterns were temporally and spatially meaningful to their corresponding design intentions.