Saturday, August 29, 2009

Gestalt

I've been familar with Gestalt pshcology sicne I was little, most of us have. I have always had an interest in images playing with our minds. The Gestalt theory explains that our brian has the ability to put lines and curves into forms with the help of our senses. There are four key principles in this theory. The first is emergence. This is when a bunch of lines, dots, blobs, etc. create an image that takes a minute to come together. You first see the image as a whole and then the individual parts reviel themselves. Second would be reification. This plays with contour lines that aren't really there or invisable. Usually they are created by other objects. Third we have multistability. Multistability includes an object that can be viewed as different images and has the ability to jump from image to image.

For example to make an image stable we would color the bottom left square red to indicate that it is the front. Then you could no longer jump from image to image. Last is invariance where a single shape can be rotated, morphed, scaled, or translated but still be recognized as the same shape.

1 comment:

  1. Yes, a lot of people know about gestalt principles even if not by name. I could have started the lecture by asking people to try and draw an optical illusion that they are familiar with. As we work professionally as designers it is important to know the words that will help us talk with other designers and to explain to our clients why something works and why they should pay us the big bucks.

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