Towards Novel Urban Planning Methods -- Using Eye-tracking Systems to Understand Human Attention in Urban Environments

Abstract

Data on how humans perceive the attractiveness of their (urban) environments has been mainly gathered with qualitative methods, including workshops, interviews and group discussions. Qualitative methods help us to understand the phenomenon, albeit with the cost of sufficient information as concerns its details. We may end up confirming something that we as researchers have 'programmed' to get as a result. Here we take a complementary approach, having collected eye tracking data from two case experiments. The participants to these experiments were professional urban planners and non-professionals respectively. We asked them to view planning-related artefacts comprising architectural illustrations, photographed landscapes and planning sketches. After analysing the findings from these experiments, we draw guidelines for using the eye tracking system in urban planning processes for gathering the human perceptions of attractive urban environments