Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Visual Busyness (slide 13)

And I want to also say avoid visual busyness because we’ve been saying contrast is really [overused]; I think you have to use contrast sparingly. All of a sudden the place is so busy that you’re trying to take in too much information. And if it’s hard to see, it takes you a long time to take in all that information.

So I think what you have to do is use the contrast on the edges of things to tell you where the edge of the counter is, to tell you where the floor meets the wall, to tell you when something sits out [and protrudes into the[ space, to tell you when there’s a freestanding object. But you don’t want to then start balancing it by just putting it all over.

And you see that. Sometimes you see it in the ceiling pattern, but the ceiling isn’t all that high and you have all these beams running across. You look at it. The first thing you see is there’s a lot going on here, and so you feel like you have to really [concentrate]. And we can avoid that by making spaces simpler, avoid alternating light and dark areas.