Awareness

The experience that I’m interested in is awareness. Firstly, let me explain how I define this word, it is the ability to perceive, to feel or to be conscious of events, objects, or sensory patterns.

We have limits of our perception. We can see everything at the same time, but we cannot look at everything at the same time. We can hear everything at the same time, but we cannot listen to everything at the same time.

The reason why we cannot see everything in detail at the same time, according to Hogarth’s theory of the selective focus, is because we have a limited span focus of our vision, which is the sharp definition can be cover less than one degree while the rest of our visual field appears progressively indistinct.

There is also another theory of selective focus, but this one is due to hearing, which is the cocktail effect. It is the effect that people would tune in to a single voice and tune out all others, because they are able to focus only one auditory. We could see this effect in a party or noisy room where the people can focus on a single conversation.

So, in order to make people be aware of something, we have to attract their attention or do something to alert their perception.

According to the book ‘The Sense of Order’ by E.H. Gombrich, it says that the contrast between disorder and order can alert our perception; there are 2 kinds of pattern, camouflage pattern and conspicuous pattern. Camouflage pattern: a random distribution of elements, barely notice. Conspicuous pattern; stand out clearly and visibly against the background

These patterns can be found in the Bellagio, Las Vegas. For the exterior, the building itself is huge so they set back the building and put a big fountain in front of it, which it creates an empty space in front of it and make the building stands out among the blue sky and water. The façade of the building has got a pattern of windows, which makes the building visibly from far distant against the background.

The space inside Bellagio is full of combinations of decorations, all are quite small, densely spaces and quite distant from the observer, which make all of there elements merge into texture, we merely see the texture but can’t see every details unless we sit down and look at those details one at a time. And because there are a lot of stuffs happening, it‘s harder to be aware of things.

In the book, they also said that timing and rhythm could also alert our awareness. They said about the expected tick-tock of the clock which will be disappear from our awareness, but it could alert us again when there is some change to the rhythm or it suddenly stop, same as our breathing rhythm and walking pace.

From these information, it could be conclude that, anything that happens differently from the ordinary could attracts our attention and make us aware, such as when the music is suddenly louder, or moving in a different direction from others such as jumping, or something that happens in contrast to the atmosphere, such as blinking of light in the dark.        

There are so many elements in the world we living, some can get our attention but some just disappear. Since we cannot aware everything at the same time, so I’d like to create a simulator to test what can makes people aware or attracts people attention.