Journals Proceedings

Abstract

The application of eye tracking technologies becomes more and more relevant in the research of human behaviour. Due to advances in the usability of eye tracking systems, the reduction of its costs and improvements in its accuracy and precision, the number of users grows constantly. Today, eye tracking is already well-established in neuroscience, psychology, industrial engineering and human factors, marketing/advertising and computer science. The results within these research fields show the very high potential of eye tracking to gain new insights in the thinking and acting processes of human beings. In engineering design research the usage of eye tracking is still at its beginning. This paper presents the basic idea to learn from the disciplines that are more experienced in eye tracking experiments and to transfer successfully applied approaches to engineering design research. Based on this idea two eye tracking studies from engineering design are presented. The first one investigates visual strategies of novice and experienced design engineers, the second considers the behaviour of engineers while analysing a physical technical system. The results of both studies show that the data gained by eye tracking experiments provides an adequate basis to better understand human behaviour in design processes and thus might allow a human-centred improvement and development of engineering design methods and tools.