Colour in the Designed Environment

T. Jefferies, Judith Mottram

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationColor and Design
    EditorsMarilyn DeLong, Barbara Martinson
    Place of PublicationLondon, UK
    PublisherBerg
    ISBN (Print)9781847889515
    Publication statusPublished - Nov 2012

    Bibliographical note

    Author's note: The book draws on a wide range of international scholars and practitioners to provide a comprehensive overview about colour and design for scholars, professionals and students. This, the second chapter, brings together current thinking from a number of adjacent fields to rethink colour and design for the urban environment. We argue that despite colours’ defining characteristic in enabling visual distinction between objects, and its important role in branding and place-making, it does not feature explicitly enough as a study topic within the benchmarks for professional education in the fields of architecture and art and design in the UK.

    The chapter is expected to be widely read and has the potential to stimulate a deeper understanding of a range of recent work on colour in relation to place-making, colour naming, branding, and design codes. The combination of case studies with the broad disciplinary scholarship provides a thorough and distinctive platform for the discussion. This approach is in part what makes this collaboration distinctive and enables it to contribute to new ways of thinking about colour across the design disciplines.

    The paper builds on work for an invited seminar on Colour & Place-Making for Chung Ang University in Korea, as part of their major project on re-branding the City of Incheon through colour (2009), and a keynote presentation for the Society of Dyers and Colourists’ (Mottram, J. 'Contemporary Art and Colour Thinking' SDC Annual Conference, May 2010, Nottingham, UK). The use of case study with contemporary practitioners was first used in the invited paper ‘Contemporary artists and colour: meaning, organisation and understanding’, for the event Colour and Design in the Natural and Engineered Worlds, organised by the Linnean Society of London and IMechE. Liam Gillick noted that the systematic approach to analysis of the interview was ‘extraordinary’ within the visual arts sector.

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