GazeAway: Designing for Gaze Aversion Experiences
Nathalie Overdevest, Rakesh Patibanda, Aryan Saini, Elise Van Den Hoven, and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller. 2024. GazeAway: Designing for Gaze Aversion Experiences. In Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 177, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650771
Abstract
Gaze aversion is embedded in our behaviour: we look at a blank area to support remembering and creative thinking, and as a social cue that we are thinking. We hypothesise that a person’s gaze aversion experience can be mediated through technology, in turn supporting embodied cognition. In this design exploration we present six ideas for interactive technologies that mediate the gaze aversion experience. One of these ideas we developed into “GazeAway”: a prototype that swings a screen into the wearer’s field of vision when they perform gaze aversion. Six participants experienced the prototype and based on their interviews, we found that GazeAway changed their gaze aversion experience threefold: increased awareness of gaze aversion behaviour, novel cross-modal perception of gaze aversion behaviour, and changing gaze aversion behaviour to suit social interaction. We hope that ultimately, our design exploration offers a starting point for the design of gaze aversion experiences.