Weekly Wayfinding: Interact with Someone on the Street

Eye Candy

I’m not the kind of person who will walk up to strangers and say hi. So for this challenge I decided to experiment with eye contact. During one of my commutes to campus, whenever I was on a sidewalk, I tried to make eye contact with everyone I met. My results were quite interesting. Overall, I was much more likely to maintain eye contact with females (beyond the initial glance) than males. Also, as I got to campus and the number of people on the sidewalks increased, I made longer connections of eye contacts with people. I think this is because in a neighborhood setting with only 2 people on the sidewalk, it is more intimate, thus people are less likely to make eye contact with someone they don’t know. On campus with a very crowded sidewalk, it is possible to make eye contact with someone relatively anonymously. Thus, there is less at stake, less of an invasion of privacy. This was quite the interesting experiment.