Unveiling the Power of Color
Part 1: Asking the Right Question
How are color and emotion objectively linked? I ask ChatGPT, which was viewed 50 million times in English last year, making it the most often opened entry.
It quickly tells me that it is a complex story lacking universal agreement. Agreement seems to be high enough, however, for a list of color associations to be published (see below). The list, generated by artificial intelligence, but fed by conventions we are all enmeshed in, is a compendium of bad science and clichés. The first example:
There exists not one whit of proof for this or its derivative statements. Something will cause your heart to race when you see the red roses in your lover’s hands, or when you are heading home, and you see smoke and a red fire truck racing by. Such visual scenes certainly induce emotions, and red is indisputably involved in them, but the roses could be pink. The fire truck could be orange.
The suggested link between red and strong emotions does not exist.
I spent the last few days reading the most current reviews of vision science, color science and the philosophy of color. They are converging towards the notion that color vision is not about seeing colors, such as red, blue, or white. Color vision is about something else.
Nonetheless, color science typically links color vision to hue recognition and these hues to emotions. A body of knowledge has been generated about something that was presumed to be central to our sense of vision (hue assessment). But our sense of vision is, in fact, assessing something else.
The ChatGPT reply to my query on January 1, 2024 at 8 AM. The list summarizes common knowledge about color effects as they are regularly published and applied to architecture and design work in all kinds of environments. My thesis is that the knowledge in this list is not relevant to spatial perception. Following it generates suboptimal choices. We will replace it with one that is valid.
The first question is: What is color vision for, if not for hue assessment? And, importantly, how does visual input arouse emotions? These questions have not been answered systematically. I will be doing this in the next blog entries to uncover how color connects to space and to emotions.
A theory deficit with a dubious sideshow (see the ChatGPT list) explains the reluctance architects often experience when they are confronted with color. What architecture and design professionals and anyone looking to redesign their apartments need instead is a practical, science-backed, and logical approach to color design. This is what I am going to describe in my blogs in 2024.
You now know that your sense of color vision is not watching hues of color and assigning them to emotions. After reading the next blog, you will know what color vision is really doing.
Happy New Year!
Katrin Trautwein
Photo credit title Shutterstock/Triff