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Learning to See
Published in Lisa Heschong, Visual Delight in Architecture, 2021
Correctly predicting the trajectory and speed of objects is one of the primary objectives of our visual system. Indeed, our brains are so primed to decipher movement that they will often assume movement even when there clearly is none. This can be demonstrated with a wide variety of optical illusions, widely available online.3 Optical illusions can teach us a great deal about how our brains process visual information, and especially about the default assumptions that we tend to make about our visual environment.
Utilizing optical illusions for creative form finding
Published in International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 2020
Munyaporn Pooripanyakun, Andrew Wodehouse
Optical illusions are a potentially rich visual source for designers. They have sparked intrigue and entertainment since at least the eighteenth century, with hundreds documented and named (Coren & Girgus, 1978). There are two principal categories of illusion: physiological and distorting illusions. Physiological illusions cause an imbalance in our visual perception, causing an image or pattern to seemingly appear or move – such as dots appearing in a Herman Grid illusion. Distorting illusions seemingly alter the size, length, or position of geometry in an image or shape – such as the inclining line of the Café Wall illusion. In a design context, these characteristics have historically been used by architects to ensure proportions seem ‘correct’ and by graphic designers to manipulate or entertain the viewer. For product designers, too, these phenomena can potentially be harnessed for positive affective user experiences: to guide the user’s eye in a particular direction, to make a product seem taller or more slender than it actually is, to accentuate or highlight a contour, or to increase the contrast between different areas of a product. Modern CAD packages and computing power provide the designer with greater scope and freedom to create complex and expressive geometric form (Noble et al., 2009). There is also a constant demand for new designs, tailored to market segments to increase their memorability (King-Gordon, 2005). The plethora of illusions available can, therefore, provide inspiration and principles for new shapes and features. Furthermore, many geometric illusions are at play even if this was not part of the original design intent, and it is, therefore, prudent to develop an awareness of their main principles as part of fundamental esthetic awareness.