Learning How to Un-See — Cliff Guren

It may seem trivial, but moments like these were exactly what motivated my obsession. They’re what vision is truly about. It’s not merely a “sense,” at least not in the way a thermometer or Geiger counter “senses,” but rather the catalyst of an experience. A flood of information and emotions alike, unleashed by the color of a gas station sign speed

seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it’s an active process of prediction and correction.

The eyes sense, and the brain interprets.

focus is not just a matter of the eyes but of the whole body and mind, of our entire being becoming more present and attuned to the world around us.

— “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” by Lawrence Weschler (about the artist Robert Irwin)

The connection between the eye and the mind is, especially for designers, obscured by common phrases we often use in describing the choices we’ve made, our intent for them, and our analysis of how they work: This arrangement of text and image “draws the eye”; this alignment maintains “line of sight”; this heat-map “tracks the eye” and shows where “

The paradox is that in order to get to the point where something becomes obvious to you, you first have to construct mental representations that allow that to happen. Once constructed, these mental images allow you to see it immediately and without any effort. But it takes a lot of time and effort to construct them.