What Eyes Want - Christopher Butler

The eyes are no more important a sense-making tool of the body than the ears, nose, tongue, or skin. Our apprehension of reality is so much more than just seen. And yet, the seen has a much greater share of human culture than the heard, smelled, tasted or felt. That may seem hyperbolic to say, but it has actually been studied! There is quantitative

My point, of course, was made: the visual language was wrong. But the insight is right in line with these studies: when our minds wander, they don’t stop thinking, and those thoughts form into judgements regardless of how conscious we are of that happening. For designers, understanding this is critical. We work against that reality with every image

Our entire body works like that. The majority of physical function is autonomous, which is astounding when you stop to ponder it. You don’t have to consciously tell your eyes to blink, your lungs to breath, your throat to swallow, your legs to hold you up, or your fingertips to feel. Virtually every cell of your body works — can do what it needs to

As it turns out, much of design is about capitalizing on that gap. In the design of objects, understanding the careful balance of mind-body coordination is what makes for useful ones. A good object is not one that you want to be rid of, nor one that functions best when you are distracted. And yet, in the world of visual media, distraction has been

The goal of any page, of course, is to retain attention through its two major phases. First, transient attention, which is to say, “the short-term response to a stimulus that distracts attention” and then, second, selective sustained attention, which is conscious focus. A fascinating presumption in differentiating between these two forms of attenti

Research on this has been done, as well. In a study titled, “Where the Eyes Wander: The Relationship Between Mind Wandering and Fixation Allocation to Visually Salient and Semantically Informative Static Scene Content,” a group of scientists attempted to observe how the mind orders and prioritizes visible information and how conscious we are of tha

The Grail scene is a useful illustration of how we navigate the world. And it’s a useful guide for anyone making anything that they hope will receive sustained attention. Just because your thing is the “true grail” of its kind doesn’t mean that your audience will “choose wisely.” Most won’t, and won’t even be capable of doing so.

If there is a single thing that I, as a designer, find hopeful about the current state of digital design it is the dismantling of the brute harnessing of distraction. While digital advertising isn’t going anywhere, the way we attach ads to content is becoming more visually elegant, and less aggressively distracting.

Often our mind-body detachment is even more profound. It’s not uncommon for commuters to be so lost in thought that they hardly experience the drive itself. The same applies to most of our mundane movements through the world. Even now, as I type this, I focus more on expressing thoughts and hardly at all on the individual movements of my fingers on