According to the words of Sigmund Freud...

Imagine walking down the sidewalk on your typical morning route to work. The average chalk drawings of elementary school students – smiley faces, butterflies and rainbows – are spotted along the ground. However, suddenly, out of nowhere, a gigantic hole is discovered in the sidewalk – a hole that seems to drop straight down into another world.

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Peering down into the hole in the sidewalk through the bird’s-eye view allows the new world below to be seen from a perspective with great depth. However, after peering even closer, the realization hits that this hole in the sidewalk is just a mere chalk drawing – drawn with the technique of spacial illusion.

While on the topic of illusion, design can also incorporate the illusion of motion into works of art. Why else would people continue to pay a rip-off fee to use photo booths at carnivals and amusement parks? Photo booths offer customers what normal cameras cannot: the mystifying illusion of multiple images.

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As seen in the multiple images set of American socialite, Edie Sedgwick [see image above], a sense of movement is captured when the multiple images of her different facial expressions are placed together. The movement is captured like the movement from an old-fashioned flipbook as viewers scan from one image to the next.

Like the illusion of space, the illusion of movement may be a natural sensation for people to experience because it helps make perceiving design in creative and more appealing ways. As psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, once stated, “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”