Gestalt Psychology
Quick Read to the Ultimate Guide
Human vision is not a direct process where an exact representation is formed from the light energy entering the eye. Instead, there are additive processes in the visual system, which influence the mental representation we form for each visual event.
The Origins of Gestalt Psychology
By grounding yourself firmly with timeless design principles that explain past design successes and failures, you will thus be able to prevent the increasingly common problem of being caught up by the latest trends (and repeating the same, avoidable mistakes).
Structuralism states perceptions are created through the unconscious combination of ‘sensations’ in the human mind.
Gestalt Psychology
I: The Underlying Principles — Emergence
Emergence is a perceptual phenomenon that captures the sensation of meaningful elements emerging from our visual scene. Human perception helps to create our experience of an object or scene instead of the individual parts representing the complete sensation.
II: Reification
Reification is thought to arise from illusory/subjective contours, which evoke the perception of an edge without luminance or color change across that edge.
Human perception is constructive because a whole mental representation is constructed from less explicit sensory information. It has to fill in the blanks to form a complete and meaningful mental representation. Hence, Reification is a perceptual ability that converts an abstract concept into something concrete using illusory/subjective contours, which evokes an edge's perception.
III: Multistability
Multistable perception is where ambiguous shapes, images, and scenes are perceived as multiple, meaningful forms, depending on shifts in attention and other spontaneous, subjective changes.
Ex. Bistable figures. After looking at this figure for a while, you will notice that there are two interpretations. One is a central vase; the second one silhouettes of two faces looking in at each other. This image is bistable: while you look at it, your perception will alternate between the vase and the faces.
IV: Invariance
Invariance represents one facet of human perceptual organization. Invariance is used to describe the human perceptual ability to perceive simple geometrical objects as constant regardless of their:
- Rotation/orientation
- Translation
- Scale and elastic deformations
- Lighting and variation in component features.
Without it, the world would be incongruous and confusing, requiring continuous analysis to establish constants in an ever-changing world.
V: Figure/Ground Organisation
The perceptual phenomenon that allows the human to focus on specific elements and filter out the rest of the scene is referred to as figure/ground organization. By switching our attention to a change in edge assignment from one area of a display to another, the meaning can change in turn.
Example: Figure/Ground organization is used when you read this sentence; the words printed in black (figure) stand out against the white paper (ground). When we use figure-ground, we organize visual information by perceptually dividing a visual scene into a ‘figure.’
VI: The Law of Pragnanz
The Gestalt principles may only outline the many perceptual biases that underlie human perception. Still, they help us appreciate the amazing capacity of the human mind to process an enormous amount of disconnected information into a coherent, meaningful, and usable representation of the world to safely interact with our surroundings securely, confidently, quickly, and accurately.
VII: The Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organisation
Human visual perception is marked by an innate drive to ‘convert’ visual information into familiar and personally meaningful representations of our environment. I can see a by-product of this drive in the way we perceive optical illusions.
Playing with perception
For designers, the Gestalt laws of the perceptual organization should not be thought of as pure descriptions of perceptual phenomena; instead, they present us with ways and methods of viewing and analyzing visual scenes, displays, and individual elements. Collectively, they allow us to innovate and improve viewing and user experiences.
The Gestalt laws can be used to create meaningful scenes from a small number of elements. Exploit the power of our form-generating abilities to achieve minimalism in your designs.
While it may seem counter-intuitive at first, white or negative space can be used to conjure visual scenes and images that are just as attention-grabbing as busy, detailed ones. Utilize white space to keep your designs simple yet effective.
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