Visual Thinking for Design

Chapter 2 What We Can Easily See

Imagine a thief searching a moonlit room with a flashlight. He can see the vague outlines of furniture, but no details at all. He uses the narrow beam of the flashlight to pick out the tops of dressers and side tables where he expects valuables may be. Our visual attention actually works something like this; we move the spotlight of our attention by moving our eyes from point to point, picking out details. Generally we only have vague information to plan each eye movement, so we often fail to find the information we seek on a particular eye fixation. But some things are very easy to find even at the edge of the visual field, like a blinking light over the water, or a bright patch of red sweater in a crowd of ...