![]() Meera Umasankar brilliantly uses this technique in many of her visualizations. By placing a line or shading around visual elements on a dashboard, signals that objects within the boundary form one, or belong together. The definition of enclosure is this: objects collected within a boundary-like structure are perceived as a group. Examples will be provided for each of the following: Enclosure, Similarity, Proximity, and Symmetry. This post will review how the four most common Gestalt Principles in data visualization design (highlighted in bold above) can be used to enhance how people view and interpret your visual, and guide your analytical story. There are seven main Gestalt principles that have clear applications in data visualization. Additionally, they help your reader better organize and interpret charts and graphs and make sense of the information visually, with exceptional speed.Ĭheck out the viz below in it’s interactive form which shows descriptions for all seven Prinicples. So why is it important to understand these laws of perception when working in data visualization? Well, for one, they can help guide your decision making as you put together a graph or a dashboard. Gestalt principles, as well as pre-attentive attributes (which I’m not reviewing here), are methods by which we organize the world so that it’s familiar, makes sense, and is easy to process. So what does our brain do? It simplifies. ![]() The fact is that there is just too much for our brains to take in and if we did, we would be paralyzed by trying to interpret it all. If you are aware of optical illusions or the famous “gorilla in a crowd” study, you know that we often don’t process everything in our visual field. This is all to say that our brain often sees things different than what is actually present. While 70% of our experience of the world is taken in through the sense of vision, our brains can only process less than 5% of our visual world at a time.This is why people may have perfectly functioning eyes, but still cannot see if those pathways to the brain are wired incorrectly or are damaged, such as with individuals with Cortical Visual Impairment (see a viz on that here). Vision, and how we perceive or interpret, what we see, is mostly a result of our brain and nervous system pathways transmitting sensory stimuli.Without going into too much about sensory perception, brain pathways, and the biology of our eye, let’s just get two important facts clear: A major reason that humans perceive the world, and the objects within it, into organized, regular, and simple shapes, schemas, figures, or forms, is due to how we visually interpret the world. At its simplest, the whole form is perceived (or emerges to our visual pathways) rather than the individual parts. The theory of Gestalt has roots in philosophy and psychology dating back to the late 1800s. The whole takes on its own form that only exists because of the parts. ![]() This is an important distinction because the whole isn’t more than the parts, it is different than the parts. The translation is: The whole is other than the sum of its parts. More likely, perhaps, is that you are familiar with the statement, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” It’s worth noting that the common phrase is often translated inaccurately. ![]() If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past century, then you’ve probably heard of the word Gestalt, the German word for form, shape, or figure. Thank you to all the participants this month!** The Whole Is What, Exactly? **This post serves as both a recap of February’s #ProjectHealthViz, which was on Sanitation, as well as a guide to four common Gestalt Principles.
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