Abstract
Colour patches have been widely used by designers in developing colour schemes and sometimes by customers in colour selection. It is important to clarify whether colour patches show the same emotional effect as those by real objects. In our previous study, several colour science based colour-emotion models were developed for colour patches. To see whether these models can be applied to real objects, a psychophysical experiment was carried out in a real-sized room where the following four items were presented: coloured vases, coloured walls, tablecloth, and carpet. The experiment was divided into ten sessions and the walls were painted ten times with different colours. In each session, ten vases in different colours were presented individually in front of the walls. Eleven adjective pairs were used in the experiment for subjects to judge colour emotions evoked by the combination of the vase and the wall colours. The experimental results show little impact of the tablecloth and the carpet colours on the colour emotions for the whole scene of the room. The results also show that in this real-room environment, the foreground colours (the vases) made far greater contribution to colour emotions of the whole scene than did the background (the walls). It should be noted that the wall colours can be regarded as a surround rather than a background, and thus it is difficult to tell whether the experimental results were owing to the fact that there was no “foreground- background effect”. Therefore, it would be necessary to clarify the difference between the effects of background and surround for the future work.
Keywords
colour emotion, colour meaning, colour planning, colour design, real-object environment, foreground-background effect
Citation
Ou, L., Luo, M., and Woodcock, A. (2004) Colour Emotions for Real Objects., in Redmond, J., Durling, D. and de Bono, A (eds.), Futureground - DRS International Conference 2004, 17-21 November, Melbourne, Australia. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2004/researchpapers/59
Colour Emotions for Real Objects.
Colour patches have been widely used by designers in developing colour schemes and sometimes by customers in colour selection. It is important to clarify whether colour patches show the same emotional effect as those by real objects. In our previous study, several colour science based colour-emotion models were developed for colour patches. To see whether these models can be applied to real objects, a psychophysical experiment was carried out in a real-sized room where the following four items were presented: coloured vases, coloured walls, tablecloth, and carpet. The experiment was divided into ten sessions and the walls were painted ten times with different colours. In each session, ten vases in different colours were presented individually in front of the walls. Eleven adjective pairs were used in the experiment for subjects to judge colour emotions evoked by the combination of the vase and the wall colours. The experimental results show little impact of the tablecloth and the carpet colours on the colour emotions for the whole scene of the room. The results also show that in this real-room environment, the foreground colours (the vases) made far greater contribution to colour emotions of the whole scene than did the background (the walls). It should be noted that the wall colours can be regarded as a surround rather than a background, and thus it is difficult to tell whether the experimental results were owing to the fact that there was no “foreground- background effect”. Therefore, it would be necessary to clarify the difference between the effects of background and surround for the future work.