Ways of doing things (9) Gestalt and other perceptive guides

How things are done in art can be an useful principle for creating new products or services in many business fields.

The psychological principles of Gestalt are often used in art. Other similar principles, too, like the gallery space itself (a 3D Gestalt?) or the stereotype of a table, help the visitor’s perception to focus on what is significant, to recognize a form, and to create meaning.

The following images are from various exhibitions in Zurich.

[flickrslideshow acct_name=”ideadetective” id=”72157623546611424″]

Here are some working principles based on the idea of Gestalt:

1. Deform the stereotype of a table (a principle used in arts and crafts, too).
   
2. Different materials and objects are optically unified by a coherent form, e.g. a cylinder / a human body / geometric forms / a line / a rectangle, the frame.
   
3. Arbitrarily (?) assembled materials are unified by one color (gold).
   
4. Perception is guided by types of “bases”, e.g. put everything on a pedestal / on a carpet on the floor (red) / on a shelf / a base on another base (little objects on a book on a shelf).
   
5. The room, the declared exhibition space is a guiding principle. See the image with the boxes: this is on left of the entrance to a gallery and on the right is a coat-rack with umbrellas, but this won’t affect the visitor’s perception of the exhibition. Use any part of a room, e.g. put things on the floor (the neon lights) / pin papers on the wall / put something in a transparent box and hang it to the wall. (Other parts that are not shown here: the ceiling, the windows, the lights and so on.)

Check out the CSID showroom Medamothi, too. It is an open space for all types of visualizations. From business facts and charts to analytical art. Because there is more to visualization than just PowerPoint.