Great designers understand the powerful role that psychology plays in visual perception. What happens when someone’s eye meets your design creations? How does their mind react to the message your piece is sharing? — Laura Busche, Brand Content Strategist at Autodesk
These are the questions we started off with gestalt perception principles, which really hook me to experiment and understand them more.
We cannot possibly influence human perception with our creations if we don’t understand the driving forces behind them.
A very obvious phenomenon everything in this universe undergoes is the conditioning, which further is the result of the constant interactions the do with things around them, so, can we say that if u understand interaction we can get clarity on human perception.
After all class discussions, I have visualised our body as a sensor receiver, brain as the processing unit and the world as emitter of many different signals emitting all the same time. To segregate them, and avoid going crazy, our brain visualize our surroundings as unitary forms or groups.
NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS AROUND:
01. Simplicity
The law of simplicity indicates that our mind perceives everything in its simplest form.
Essentially, simplicity is about helping the eye find “comfortable” figures used to trigger an interpretation of what we are trying to show.
02. Figure-ground
The figure-ground principle helps to explain which element in a design will immediately be perceived as the figure and which will be perceived as the ground.
- Area: The mind often perceives the smallest object in the composition as the figure, and the larger as the ground.
- Convexity: Convex elements are associated with figures more often than concave.
03. Proximity
We perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they are laid out close together. As an example, think about how proper kerning can help the eye understand which letters make up individual words. In some cases, excessive spaces between letters can cause confusion as to when one word ends and the next begins.
04. Similarity
We perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they look like each other. The principle of similarity can be triggered using color, size, orientation, texture and even fonts.
05. Symmetry
Symmetrical elements are perceived as part of the same group.
06. Parallelism
Elements with the same or very similar slopes are associated as a single group.
07. Continuity
Elements are visually associated if they are aligned with each other. Lines are perceived as a single figure insofar as they’re continuous. The smoother their segments are, the more we see them as a unified shape.
08. Closure
We perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they are part of a closed figure.
09. Common Region
When we find several elements that are part of a single region, we associate them as a single group.
The human brain is wired to see structure, logic, and patterns. It helps us make sense of the world.
Experimenting with Gestalt
After the discussion on gestalt I tried a little experiment but before you proceed to read the description , please look at the below video very carefully and tell what is the last image is of? ( first thing which you see)
Description:
By asking the viewers to look at a curated set of pictures ‘carefully’ I tried to make the viewer see a coffee mug in the end .. instead of heart or ear. As per my understanding, it happened because when the viewers looked at the pictures ‘carefully’ they took in the strategically placed hints of food, morning, lazy, office (which are all the indirect associations of coffee) along with the other random-no context pictures. Through this visual narrative, a thought pattern was set in their minds which made them see a coffee mug.
Observations:
- People who had lower attention snap or when the video was fast because of which the viewer is unable to grasp hints .. in that case mostly people said it’s a heart.
2. Old people who are not very much acquainted with the symbol of heart perceived it as ear.
3. People with good observations instantly saw a mug after the video.
I tried this as I was thinking if one can make others think and feel same for an abstract arts in an exhibition by placing dramatic intentional elements outside the gallery. Can we generate a particular emotion from a visual by intentionally placing hints and clues around its space? I guess we can do such stuffs and hence, I will continue my research on Gestalt Psychology and its applications.
