Understanding Visual Engagement with Street Edges through Mobile Eye-Tracking: Capturing, Comprehending, Communicating Towards Evidencing Change

James Simpson (Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffiel)d

For over 50 years many writers and researchers have detailed the social and experiential significance of street edges that span the indoor / outdoor interface of urban streets. Despite this, delivery of experientially rich and socially responsive street edges capable of enhancing the quality of daily pedestrian experience remains challenging. Frequently, the outcome in many contemporary towns and cities is an abundance of street edges that are often uninteresting, monotonous, characterless and disengaging. This presentation highlights opportunities to begin to address such an issue by using data capture through mobile eye-tracking. This method allows direct empirical insight into what people look at within complex and forever-shifting real-world environments. The data obtained can subsequently evidence and inform where and how intervention should be focused within these realms in order to begin to make them more experientially responsive and engaging.

The presentation describes an investigation that was carried out to examine how people visually engage street edges. It starts by detailing how mobile eye-tracking was used to capture such human-environment experiential engagement, along with associated data handling and analysis processes. It then examines how insights gained through eye-tracking can be visually communicated in an innovative manner that is able to engage those who influence the physical and material make-up of street edges, notably design decision-makers and people with territorial ownership over street edge spaces. Finally, with focus on street edge ground floors, there is exploration of what characteristics offer potential to make these realms more experientially rich. These intersect the interconnected influence of distinctiveness, driven by saliency; transparency and permeability; sensory complexity; as well as temporality. The result is a more robust and evidence-based understanding of how we can create urban street edges that are better equipped to engage pedestrians and beneficially enhance the quality of their everyday experience of urban streets.