After graduating with a minor in psychology, I didn’t exactly learn the brain inside and out. However, I developed certain curiosities and am always looking for ways to tie psychology into design. In fact, I feel that design hinges on the principles of psychology. After all, is design not packaging visual ideas in relation to what we know about human perception? We make design decisions because we believe it will influence readability, usability, aesthetic appeal, or emotional impact (and I’m sure there are other reasons). We use relationships in things like size, position, color, and form to accomplish this. All of these correlate with psychological concepts, which are very powerful things to leverage in design.
The most fascinating and controversial subject in the field of psychology is consciousness. Some psychologists argue that little progress has been made, that we have done nothing that truly helps us further understand what consciousness really is. We’ve found the physical correlates of consciousness, but that doesn’t exactly explain how the subjective experience is created. Because it can’t be explained purely in terms of physical brain hardware like neurons and such, philosophy has taken up a large role in the discussion of consciousness. In reading the blog Conscious Entities, where some of the top minds in the field contribute articles and comments, I came across some very interesting concepts. One is called qualia. Qualia is the experience of things, or the “way things seem”. The prototypical example is the color red. We can describe it in terms of a light’s wavelength, but we can’t truly describe the way it looks. How do you know that what you see as red is perceived the same way as another person? There is no “right” way to perceive a color. In other words, our conscious experience does not directly reflect reality, but rather a filtered representation of it.
I’ve given a very simplistic overview of qualia compared to what’s been discussed by the greatest psychologists and philosophers. If you think about it hard enough, it’ll begin to sink in how crazy of a concept it is. Just imagine, we can all be perceiving colors and such in a completely different way than each other, but calling them the same things, and there’s no way we can ever know.
Image credit: Conscious Entities (http://www.consciousentities.com)
