Beyond Attentive Displays: From Attention-Aware to Surprise-Aware Design
Over the past 25 years, attention-aware displays have gone from a niche research idea to wide-spread adoption. Originally invented to combat information overload in a future world of many devices, attention-aware displays are more relevant than ever in a world of fragmented attention spans. Attentive UX is now everywhere: in cars, smartphones, ambient displays, virtual reality headsets, and smart homes. In this talk, I revisit what attention actually is, why eye tracking does not describe it sufficiently, and how surprise forms a new design commodity for pervasive displays. Surprise is what results from the user’s brain predicting the world – a discrepancy between prediction and observation, in bits. It builds in the brain as a potential energy that is released as action, learning or emotion. Within this neuromorphic design framework, user performance and error can be analyzed through a single formalism. The talk closes with some examples of how surprise-aware displays might be a solution for keeping humans in the loop with AI agents, and an agenda for the design and evaluation of surprise-aware interaction using methods borrowed directly from statistical mechanics.