![]() After observing that people naturally made order out of elements and created a whole new idea as a result, Gestaltists sought to lay out the mechanisms used to do so.Īs an example, think of a film or a piece of music. Gestalt thinking sought to do the opposite. As such, constructivists were trying to break down thinking into its smallest pieces. The school of psychology that predated these men, called Constructivism, held that human thought and ideas are built up of small pieces just the way that elements are built up of atoms and molecules. Beginning around 1912, these psychologists strove to identify how the different parts of an idea are linked together by the human mind into a single whole. These rules are based on the work of three psychologists named Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. ![]() No, there wasn’t some design genius named Gestalt who first identified all these design principles. Read on for a full rundown of the Gestalt principles and how they’re used to build beautiful, effective designs. Many designers have come across Gestalt principles before but many have a narrow view on how they can be applied. A general summary of some of the most important aspects of design psychology, the Gestalt principles are several rules that summarize how our minds process visual information.īuilding with these design fundamentals allows for a more intuitive design and lessens the cognitive load on the user, meeting their needs in an easier way and enticing them to use the product again in the future. In the pattern on the right, you probably perceived a border-less white square on top of another white square with black borders, and both of the white squares touch four small black circles.Designers have long been preoccupied with the way psychology impacts their trade. In the middle pattern, you probably perceive a border-less white triangle that is on top of three sets of four concentric circles. In the pattern on the left, you probably perceive two lines of dots that cross over. So now there are two groups of dots, the black ones on the left and the blue ones on the right. This means that if we change the color of some of the dots, the similarity principle makes us see them as a group. The Gestalt principle of SIMILARITY says that our visual system sees things that look similar as being in the same group. So here the most likely perception is that you see three groups of dark dots, each of which consists of two columns of three dots. The Gestalt principle of PROXIMITY says that objects close to each other, especially when they are aligned, are perceived as belonging together. And then you will always see the dog when you see this picture. But if you stare at the right side of the picture and try to see a Dalmatian dog (with black spots on its body) sniffing at the ground, it will suddenly pop into your mind. In this picture because there are many black and white regions it hard to see some of them as the FIGURE and some of them as the GROUND. Flipping between the face and vase interpretations involves changing which part of the image is “figure” and which is “ground.” The brain can only make sense of the world in one way at any point in time – we see the face or the vase, but not both. This famous drawing is called the FACE-VASE ILLUSION because people either see two faces or a single vase. When the visual information is ambiguous, this can result in two alternating interpretations. ![]() The first principle proposed by the perception scientists is that we automatically organize some part(s) of the visual field as in the front – the FIGURE – and other parts as in the back – the GROUND. (You can measure “simpler” here by counting the number of words it takes to describe the two interpretations). ![]() These principles capture the idea that our minds have a bias toward simple explanations, and it is simpler to see two overlapping squares than to see the small blue squares surrounding the red square. What caused you to see it the way you did? About a hundred years ago, some German scientists who studied how our visual perception works proposed a set of “Gestalt” principles, a word that means that we see things as a “whole” rather than as a set of parts. Or did you see a red square surrounded by four small blue triangles? Psychologists have studied how these mechanisms work “normally” but also how they can create ambiguity or illusions.ĭid you see a red square in front of a blue square? Our visual systems “carve” the visible world into objects in an automatic way that we don’t think about – – it just happens. ![]() 47 Automatic Organizing – The Gestalt Principles ![]()
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