Teaching Gestalt theory

This week Yang Qian and I took a brief session on 'Gestalt Theory' during the studio time. We had to also base the teaching time on the studio principle of 'Push Yourself!'

We began with reading several articles online on the theory of Gestalt and its application in UI, as well as going through the book "Gamestorming". Post which we decided it would be best to focus the learnings towards its application as Interaction designers as the principles from both these important ideas could be widely used in any discipline or medium like photography, art, cognitive psychology, sound, music or even dance! We started with the overall idea of Optical illusions and the popular Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka's phrase of "the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts". We wanted to convey the ability of the mind to perceive the overall meaning of self-organized parts through its application in Visual design and UI. 45 minutes were designed to be filled with basic theory and activities that pushed the participants to engage themselves individually as well as in smaller groups to find the individual parts of Gestalt principles working in their environments as well as in screen based mobile and web systems. We engaged everyone by encouraging them to look for 7 basic Gestalt principles- Proximity, Similarity, Common Region, Symmetry, Closure, Continuation and Common Fate- and also gave a handout for them to follow through the activities.

The experience helped us to understand that its challenging to make a group work fast with the idea of "pushing yourself"-which needs to be communicated thoroughly and repeatedly, possibly in innovative ways as the participants could miss the goal of the activities at any point, very easily, especially through short time-based games.

We also learnt that as the activities made everyone go through each principle one-by-one, if there was time, we could perhaps end with another wrap-up with the idea of how Gestalt is essentially about making meaning of the overall or whole system. Even though we worked through so meticulously at the individual parts of Visual design and UI based exercises, leading them to explore other mediums as well to find Gestalt and see how that might work and keep the thoughts rolling.

For folks reading this post, do watch this amazing Kinetic Sculpture at the BMW Musuem and guess the Gestalt principles working!