Get Out of My Bubble: A Discussion of Proximity

January 13, 2011 by Taylor Studios in Design & Planning

Have you ever felt as though people are getting in your space? When you’re at the grocery store and the person behind you starts creeping forward with their cart, or on an airplane when you’re forced to sit only two inches, if that, next to a complete stranger? The measure of closeness, or distance, is discussed as proximity.

In design, the purpose of proximity is to organize. Good use of proximity can clearly organize and communicate information. Close proximity can imply a relationship, while distant proximity implies the opposite. The practice of proximity is to group related items together.

You can recognize proximity everyday: the buttons on your car stereo or dashboard (notice how buttons that have a related purpose are grouped together), restaurant menus (the steaks and chops are grouped, appetizers are grouped, deserts are grouped, and more), buttons on a microwave or dishwasher, software interfaces, and much more. When was the last time you wrote an outline? Did you use bullet points to group related information? Proximity is even evident in the way your refrigerator is organized. You wouldn’t mix vegetables and raw meat in the crisper, would you?

In exhibit design, the designers and planners group information appropriately, both in the organization of information and ideas, and in the physical design layout of the space. Once an outline containing a central theme and subthemes is created, the next visual representation of proximity can be seen in the form of a bubble plan. A bubble plan shows where information is grouped, how close together or far apart different groups of information are in relation to each other, and the order in which a visitor would experience those groups.

Proximity can also evoke emotional responses. The measure of proximity from element to element can indicate and suggest different types of relationships such as passive, confrontational, tangent, and overlapping. These proximity relationships can also describe some of our personal behaviors.

Next time you’re at the grocery store standing in line, look at how close you are to the person in front of you. Are you passive – hanging back a distance? Confrontational – leaving just enough space to recognize that you are two individual customers and are not shopping together? Tangent – attached to the hip of the person in front of you? Or overlapped –if you fall in to this category, seek help to improve your standing-in-line skills.