Sunday 6 December 2015

Design and Emotion - Psychology of design

In this Lecture we talked about several different topics from Perception and Illusion, we also talked about emotional engagement and meaningful communication. We firstly started off by looking at Perception and Illusion, where we talked about being aware of the environment that I live in and how do we take emotional perspective. I found that we did this by developing a deep self awareness and the meaning from other participants.

We started off my looking at by looking a photograph that featured a lamp post. We were asked whether we could make out what it was wherever we were sat in the lecture theatre, most of us could see what the object was. We could tell that it was lamp post because we have grown up  to see what a lamp post looks like at night and how the shape of the lamp post looks from different angles and different perspectives. We all have different perspectives to other people, as people have different views about lamp posts, as some maybe scared of the dark.

We then talked about perception in more detail, we found out that we only take notice of the parts that are important and that we have to except what is thrown at you and try to solve it as best as you can, which means to us as an individual. This is known as Perception. Once we had looked at Perception in more detail, we then looked at visual stimulation where we looked at the eye and how it works. I found that when looking at an Image, it hits the back of the eye inside and the brain then flips the image upwards so it then makes sense. We then looked at how the inside of eye was made up of, these were cone cells that makes up the majority of the eye and the rod cells inside the eye only see black and white, when we see something in the corner of your eye. We were then told that we should always pay attention to what catches our eye in the future. I also found out that when something catches our eye it is a slower movement than we thought.

After this we were then shown a clip about the visual stimulation from the tv channel BBC Four. I found that the clip was very informational documentary, which talks about senses that are relevant to the visual stimulation. One of the sense was sight, the film talked about how the senses have changed over the years and how we would cope without any on the senses. Within the film, people were chosen for a experiment and lock in rooms for 48 hours to see how they would cope on their own, after 30 hours of being in the room they started to become anxious and create thoughts that weren't real. A woman says there is a snake there. However there wasn't see was making it up, as her senses were increased by being anxious. The film talked about smell and taste being linked to the visual stimulation. We found out that the sense that we mostly rely on would probably be touch, starting from birth when you are able to touch parts that are new, it shows us the understanding that there is someone else other than ourselves and touch is the most important. Furthermore hearing would be the most important sense for a game of squash as the sound from the ball hitting would be the you would listen for through the ear. A girl tired an experiment  with headphones whilst playing squash, I noticed that she found it a lot more difficult to hit the ball and play the game of squash. We then found out how the slightest touch can change lots of views.

Once we had watched the film we then looked at several illusions like the union jack flag and the Basketball game Illusion.




You had to stare at the picture for 30 seconds, once you had then stared at the flag for long enough once you looked at a blank white space a union jack flag would appear with the original colours from white, red and blue. I found that this illusion was very creative and different. However whilst watching the basketball game illusion I found that this was very similar to something that I had already watched when I was younger, so I could tell what was going to happen in the video. 

We then moved onto looking at  colour vision, where we were shown different illusions that displayed different numbers, when we were looking at this I had to look at the designs very slowly, as I had to try and work out what was being shown in each behind each of the coloured shapes. After this we were then shown other illusions from grey to blue square and the yellow to grey square. I found that these illusions were good because it was different to other illusions that I had seen before. After this we were then shown another illusion that feature a snowflake that you had to stare at for 30 seconds, after this it would appear to the around the dot that was next to the image of the snowflake. 



 


Another illusion that we were shown was a geometric circles, a found that this image was very hard to focus on because it hurt my eyes as the circles were moving, however the image was very still. I found that this image was very different to some of the other illusions that we had looked at. We were then shown a illusion that featured a t-rex, I found that this illusion was so good because it was amazing to see how the illusion worked . I found that this illusion that we were shown was good because it was very different to other illusions that we had looked at in this lecture. I found that the 
T-rex was just cardboard that was flat and folded inwards. 




After looking at several illusions we then moved onto looking at perception in more detail, we looked at a photograph that was used using one ink block to create a piece of artwork, we were told that one ink block may look very different from one person compared to the other. Within this piece of artwork they had experimented with ink blocks, we found that we see what we expect to see and that we should always look into parts in more depth. After this we then talked about Micro movement, where we were given the task to read a paragraph that wasn't spelt properly, however when we were given the task to read it we noticed that we were reading the paragraph how we thought the paragraph would be read if it was spelt properly. This was because we were used to what the words were, we did this task because it taught us that we needed to look at points very differently. 

We then looked at a picture called Rubin's vase, which was picture that you have built up with different object the first part that I saw in this picture first was the people.  Once looking at the picture in more detail I then noticed the vase that was in the centre of the picture. Once we had looked at Ruben's vase we then looked at the painting called the Mona Lisa, we decided to focus on her eyes, I learnt that Mona had provisional vision and when looking at her eyes it looked like she had a raised smile, she also noticed that there was lots of shadow around the Mona Lisa. 







The final part that we looked at was perception in more depth, we started by looking at Nature vs Nurture, we watched a clip about toddlers that were used for experiment were part of the floor looked like a pattern floor however it was just glass. Within this experiment we learnt that 99.9% of the toddlers didn't cross to see their mothers that were at the side of the floor, this was because the toddlers thought that it wasn't safe to cross onto. we found that perception can be influenced by our environment. 

After this we then watched a clip about a guy that tried out googles that were used to turn the world upside down, he said that you had to think about what to do because it wasn't very simple. The presenter of the documentary said that he had to learn new skills again, as everything was new/different and harder because it was upside down. 

I felt that I learnt a lot in this lecture about how we need to look at our work from different perspectives, I am defiantly going to take a lot from this lecture because it will allow me to develop my skills even further. Overall I really enjoyed this lecture because I found that this lecture was productive.