Visual Thinking for Design

Chapter 3 Structuring Two-Dimensional Space

Patterns are formed where ideas meet the evidence of the world. Top-down attentional processes cause patterns to be constructed from the retinal image that has been decomposed, like an impressionist painting, into a myriad of features in V1. Patterns are formed in a middle ground of fluid dynamic visual processing that both pulls meaningful patterns from features and imposes order. Patterns are also the building blocks of objects, which themselves can be thought of as more complex patterns.

Understanding how patterns are constructed and reconstructed can tell us a lot about the design problems of organizing space, either in ways that are unambiguous and clear, or in ways that are subject to multiple ...