Mick McQuaid

Above, a web-based planning tool; below, an easily read mobile interface

To discuss theories in related communities, I tried to select three important works with a very obvious connection to information visualization. I would like to suggest that you think about how you can use these theories in your own work. It may also be useful to think about whether certain features of these works lose some vitality over time, or whether they are really robust across advances in technology and changes in society.

The first is an important work you may have seen in multiple contexts, a 1923 description of Gestalt psychology principles by Max Wertheimer. If this is not your first reading of this article, let me urge you to drill right down to the two questions above. If, on the other hand, you have not been exposed to Gestalt psychology, there are many introductory treatments available online. These include the convoluted history of this community, dismantled by Hitler and rejected by American behaviorists while in disorganized exile. Another thing you can find online is a more complete account of the scope of Gestalt psychology than would be possible in response to this single article. I’d like ignore all that and take the paper at face value, a viewpoint about perception using simple pictures of dots and lines, a viewpoint that was easily accessible to a number of artists such as Paul Klee and Wasily Kandinsky, who hosted Gestalt psychologists at Bauhaus seminars and who may have made it possible for Gestalt ideas to migrate into communities of working artists. So I’d like you to look at the given examples and see if they’re useful or plausible to you, without regard to historical debates about brain theory.

Part of my reason for introducing this article is its evident influence on Arnheim (1974), and there are two main things to talk about in that regard. One is part / whole relationships, while the other is a concept called Prägnanz or figural goodness. You might think of this concept as “the tendency of a process to realize the most regular, ordered, stable, balanced state possible in a given situation” (definition from the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science). Here are a couple of examples of this concept in action, both from the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. You might compare these to the understanding you derive from Wertheimer (1923). The first relates various shapes you may see to a shape you may think about when you see them.

The second is a puzzle we’ll do in class. The point of the puzzle is not so much to embarrass you because you can’t solve it and someone else can as to help you discover the role that Prägnanz plays in organizing your perception.