Grabbing a fruit from the Dining Commons after every meal eventually resulted in an amassed pile of fruits on my dorm table. Not knowing what do to with them, I simply decided to arrange them so that they would look nice. But before I even started, I noticed the effect of gestalt at work.
Photo take by Diane Wu
The arrangement of the two apples with the banana created a face! As Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics would say, “We humans are a self-centered race. We see ourselves in everything” (32, 33). Fruits have no relations to humans, and yet, I was able to see a face and project my emotions onto the fruits; the fruit looks very happy! Through such a simple placement of fruit in a way that looks like part of the face, we are able to use gestalt and assign a personality to the fruit and create many other assumptions about it.
Gestalt can be applied to countless designs found all over the world, one of which is in London titled Swim. It is a sculpture of a giant man swimming in a large field of grass. Although passersby only see the exposed left foot, the right shoulder, and arms of the swimmer, people immediately assume that the rest of the missing body parts are hidden under the grass. However, that is not the case since the commissioners did not even manufacture the rest of the body. This immediate assumption is due to gestalt; people tend to see everything as a “unified whole” when they are only given parts of a whole. This is an interesting concept designers must keep in mind. Oftentimes, what we don’t see requires the use of our imagination to fill in the empty gaps; the imagination portion of the design may be even more important and interesting than the actual object displayed for viewers to see.
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