There’s a soothing rhythm flowing through my brain when I hear the word harmony and when I picture it: it’s a perfect spread of balance.
The most basic aspect of harmony is seeing things in a ‘negative and positive’ appearance. These two spaces complement each other in such a way that they create a perfect balance. Our whole life, we’ve always seen things in a rational way— the mind and soul, nature and how we interact with it, black and white. Rationality is the main tool we use to construct our identity (with reference to the research papers of known psychologists).
People are plural beings with a dynamic set of plural identities, each of which co-exist within an individual. Each person interacts with different experiences through a different point of view and context, obtaining different self-images called Subjective Identity Forms (SIFs), based on the different roles they carry out in the environment.
Considering complexity and balance as the main ingredients and using the psychological lens, there’s an innovative framework of self-identity, different personalities and the tuning of the world together. There’s harmony not just within us but also with others and the natural world. And if you ask me, there’s a certain beauty in seeing things this way, in a harmonious tune. This process has been observed in other areas as well.
In art, by ‘positive’ we mean the focal point of an artwork and by ‘negative’ we mean the area around it. We always think that the two words have an opposite definition but here, they work in perfect harmony for the success of a painting. No matter how positive the ambience that we want in our painting is, it is the negative spaces that bring the art to life. It is their harmony that makes us call it a perfect design.
In our own home, the ideal angle of the television, the symmetrically aligned photo frames and the even number of plants all come from our Subjective Identity Forms responding to the pillar of psychology and harmonising our surroundings creating a balanced visual appearance. Creating this perfect equilibrium comes from the element of design living in the back of our minds, which is the basic flow of visual weight balancing our surroundings.
Subjective Identity Forms help us not just to organize our live in a certain way but also to understand, and love, and be. It’s a flawless yin and yang of our life, a co-existence of different identities.
– Kashvi Arora, Presidium Indirapuram, Ghaziabad
3 Likes