Developing Gestalt-based Design Guidelines for Multi-sensory Displays

Multi-sensory displays try to take advantage of a range of human senses, for example, displaying information visually and also with sound and haptic feedback. Designing multi-sensory displays is complex and needs to carefully consider human perceptual capabilities. Developing guidelines to support designers of multi-sensory displays is an important way to capture and communicate existing knowledge in this cross-discipline domain. However, the study of multi-sensory display is still an immature field and so work in this area is somewhat fragmented. Despite this many useful guidelines have been applied to visual, auditory and even haptic displays. Categorising these existing guidelines in a way to better support multi-sensory display and also developing guidelines explicitly concerned with multi-sensory design are the two overall aims of this research. One relevant area of study that has yet to be applied to multi-sensory design is Gestalt theory. Gestalt theory, originally described in 1910, can be used to explain the way we perceive and recognize patterns. Using Gestalt theory as a foundation, this paper develops a new framework to help categorise existing guidelines. This framework is also intended as a basis for developing new guidelines. The key feature of this framework is that it uses a few high-level Gestalt-based principles to help organise a large number of more detailed design guidelines.