Current area of interest
Perception
Human perception can be fooled. Our mental understanding of an object may not conform with the actual physical dimensions of that object. When fooled, we will truly ‘see’ something differently than it actually is.
Leading to the question – how can this be used to improve design? Or at least – how can we avoid being undone by this, as beauty will be either diminished or enhanced by our understanding of this phenomenon.
Perceptual shifts can originate in both the physical sense organs (collection) and in the cognitive processing phases. A cognitive processing shift would be demonstrated in the work of Josef Albers, who showed that seeing color is relative…changing the background color changes the perception of the featured color. While an organ based shift would be the optical curvatures addressed by the Greek temple builders.
Another interesting shift occurs when a viewer is in close proximity to a built object. The wide spreading sight lines are similar to a wide angled perspective projection with similar distortions that become both physically altered and subconsciously edited during the construction of our cognitive map. These processing shifts will be most active at the scale of a small building making this important to architects – landscape architects in residential markets.
Many variables contribute to the mental mapping of our environment and understanding their computation would be the design equivalent of a marksman understanding wind.