(Week 02) Discussion, Mind Mapping & Gestalt
Introduction
Today, the things we'll be talking about are mind mapping and some of the gestalt principles. Mind mapping is a new technique for brainstorming, and figure/ground and closure are gestalt principles. Scale is another vocabulary tool we use to discuss work. Please note I'm describing things very cursorily here as you should look over the hand outs.
Mind Mapping
From the "handout" link below:
A mind map is an alternative form of brainstorming that creates a diagram of ideas (and how they relate to each other) instead of a list of associations, as does conventional brainstorming. The benefits of the mind-map diagram are: that it allows one to follow how one association or idea leads to another; how associations along a particular path are grouped as similar; and it exposes how similar ideas may occur along completely different paths, which often leads to surprising and unexpected relationships between them that one might not intuitively reach otherwise.
Gestalt Principles
The gestalt principles we will be talking about today are Figure/Ground and Closure. Figure/ground speaks to our natural tendency to see objects as related to, or separated from a background or content. Closure is how our brain "fills" or completes missing parts of wholes.
Scale
Scale is both the literal size of objects in a given composition or space (ie big or small), as well as how you can use, or create scale in a composition.