GESTALT
Gestalt is a school of Psychology that studies perception, or how we make sense of the world around us. In art and design we are mainly concerned with the visual aspects of perception. The word ‘Gestalt’ is German, and has no direct translation to English. The definition is, ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. In other words a thing is made up of many parts, each part contributes to the thing, and the thing itself only is what it is because of all of its parts contributing to the whole...
Yes, I know that may not have cleared things up very well so lets use a more concrete example, like a computer. A computer is made up of many parts, monitor, keyboard, mouse, motherboard, ram, memory, etc. Each of these parts alone are basicly inanimate objects with no real use. However when we combine them we have something functional... a computer. Now, if we take a part away, like a mouse (something we are all familiar with loosing here in the lab). What do we have? We are back to the inanimate object.
Another example; consider a car’s engine. All (or most) of the parts are contributing to making the car move. If you take out the spark plugs, or carburetor, or fuel injector, what happens? On the other had what happens if we throw in something that doesn't fit like, maybe... stuff a ‘Hello Kitty’ doll head in the piston chamber because we think it’s cute?
We should approach design in a similar way. Each part of our design serves a purpose, that purpose is to communicate an idea. This is a balancing act, if we don’t have enough parts our message does not make sense (sort of like taking away the mouse). If we have to much, like the ‘Hello Kitty’, our message gets lost in the parts and the result is the same... not gong anywhere. So when we design something, we should always look each of the parts and ask some questions...
- Does it help to communicate what I want the viewer to understand?
- Can it be changed or moved in someway to better communicate it?
- Does it communicate what I want to say better by leaving it out?
(these are also good questions to ask when looking at work in a critique)
The concept of Gestalt is not always easy to understand, we will be looking at it a lot more in all the design classes. For now this should give you a basic idea about what it is.
_________________________________________________________
As stated earlier Gestalt is a field of Psychology that studies perception. In order to understand and perceive things we need to break them down into digestible chunks, like the principles of design. The Gestalt Psychologist have come up with many ways of breaking it down to better understand perception. In this class we are going to focus on 5. Yes! Another 5 principles to remember! :P
- Similarity
- Proximity
- Continuation
- Closure
- Figure Ground
Assignment: Use your sketch book to Illustrate and describe the first two terms ‘Similarity and Proximity’.
Similarity: While we may have many objects together in a group, objects that look the same or similar to one another are perceived as one thing.
Proximity: Similar or dissimilar objects that are close to one another are perceived as being one thing.
- Research each of these terms. You may use any resource you like, internet, books, the library, (there are some books on book shelf in front of room 202)
- Use simple lines and or shapes to illustrate the two terms.
- Illustrations and descriptions on separate pieces of paper).
NOTE: If searching be sure to specify gestalt and art and design. These terms have many other applications within gestalt when relating to other subjects.
Due next class meeting
