Seeing & Knowing (Teaching Fund FHNW)

Use and benefits of eye-tracking methods in information design teaching.

The proposed Teaching Fund project aims to demonstrate the extent to which the use of modern, small and lightweight eye-tracking technology can put design teaching - particularly in the field of information design - on a new basis. So far, in design classes, the perceptual and impact values of visual artifacts are evaluated based on experience and self-observation of one's own perception. However, these values do not have an objective character and are therefore often not accepted outside the design context. It is therefore not uncommon that the performance of designers is reduced to the craft aspects of image production, instead of acknowledging their ability to evaluate design with regard to the achievement of the set communicative goals. The aim of this project is therefore to find out whether the observation of one's own gaze behavior by means of modern eye tracking is a suitable method to enable students to empirically test their gaze hypotheses. To achieve this, questions of both didactic (what are suitable tasks for this purpose?) and technical nature (which evaluation criteria for the collected gaze data are informative for the design field?) arise. The findings will be tested and discussed in two two-and-a-half-day workshops with students of the HGK Basel. The results will be documented and made available to the interested public.