Teesta and I taught Gestalt Principles to our classmates in the MDes studio last week, with "Push Yourself" as the principle of our class activities.
Teesta and I started the preparation of studio teaching by filtering web articles and videos on Gestalt Principles. Since Gestalt psychology is so big a school in psychological studies, we decided to narrow it down and put our emphasis on Gestalt in UI design. This became the anchor of our lecture. During the class, we went from general (recognizing Gestalt) to specific applications (injecting Gestalt). After introducing the principles, we then pushed our classmates by requesting a certain quantity of results or share-outs in a very limited period of time.
The most obvious point that needs to be improved in our teaching is that our activities lack testing in advance. We overlooked the fact that mobile phone screens are terrible for group sharing. While we are pushing people to have as many Gestalt examples as they could, there wasn't enough time for everyone to share each of them. It was also hard to get people to work together fast. We have to adapt our activities improvisationally which is awkward and not professional. In future presentations, we will definitely simulate any group activities in the preparation stage to ensure feasibility and fluency.
Another major feedback we received is that, the 7 principles are hard to remember and distinguish. In response to this, I found a helpful article suggesting how to memorize Gestalt Principles using the story building technique. It comes with a bonus in remembering the 10 usability heuristics.
Whereas on my second thought, I started to think about why people need to memorize Gestalt Principles. We are not in middle school, so we don't remember them because Gestalt is a theory and reciting all the principles is mandatory for homework. My assumption is that when recalling Gestalt Principles, people want to exhaust all of them to make sure they have covered every area and thus have come up with relatively the most comprehensive design.
Now I see that there's something misleading in our teaching: we taught the principles one by one, pretty segmented. However, Gestalt should be a combo that "flows" in your design, rather than a set of things standing alone rigidly. Therefore a better practice would be, to let our classmates know in the beginning that it's okay if you can't remember them or find them ambiguous. Learn Gestalt by practices (Relativism stage learning) rather than by categorization (Duality stage learning).
It will also be more compelling if we introduce more front-edge topics related to Gestalt, compared to merely real-life UI examples which can be too dry and less invoking.
Finally, a few tips that are never wrong for presentations:
If you are not big enough to have a teleprompter, have printed notes as a reference and don't read the screen.
Check the technicals ahead of time.
Watch out the rhythm of switching speaker and bouncing back-and-forth.
Add presenters' names and date to slide footers.
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