Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Coventry University
Color in the Designed Environment
This chapter explores colour as a differentiating medium between products, places or processes, bringing together thinking from several fields to rethink colour and design for the urban environment. Case studies focus on the work of Maccreanor Lavington Architects (Rotterdam), who use road paint as a transformative medium, and Dashing Tweeds, who sample urban colour as the development palette for traditional tweed fabrics. The authors discuss colours’ defining characteristic for visual distinction between objects, and its role in branding and place-making, but notes its marginal presence in professional education benchmarks in architecture and art and design in the UK.
The book, edited by Marilyn DeLong and Barbara Martinson, University of Minnesota, draws on international academics and practitioners to provide a comprehensive overview about colour and design. Available in print and e-formats, the authors anticipate the chapter will to stimulate greater understanding of recent work on colour and place-making, colour naming, branding, and design codes. The combination of case studies with broad cross-disciplinary research provides a thorough platform for the discussion and enables us to contribute to new ways of thinking about colour across the design disciplines.
The chapter builds on work for an invited seminar on Colour & Place-Making for Chung-Ang University, Korea, as part of their colour branding project for the City of Incheon (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 Colour and Design in the Natural and Engineered Worlds, (Linnean Society and IMechE). Liam Gillick noted that the systematic approach to analysis of the interview was ‘extraordinary’ within the visual arts sector.
