Data scientific colour comparison among five ethnic townscapes in Singapore

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the colour characteristics of unique townscapes in Singapore, to create a colour palette that distinguishes each cultural difference, and to apply this palette to souvenirs production and public relations design for foreign tourism. Singapore is known as a multicultural country that comprises various ethnic groups, including Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Western and so on. Foreigners can experience the cultural atmosphere of certain ethnic groups in various places through the colours. In this research, we decided to particularly focus on five towns; Chinatown, Kampong Glam, Little India, Katong and Colonial District, to visualise the different regional characteristics of colours in Singapore. Firstly, many photos of the townscapes were collected in the five selected towns, five symbolic photos were chosen for each town. The characteristic nine colours for each region were extracted from those photos. The RGB data of the nine colours were picked and converted to the HSV data, and the characteristics for each town were observed on the colour space. Consequently, it was found that Chinatown exhibited warm colours, and Colonial District had low-saturation colours such as black and white as expected. Though Little India, Kampong Glam and Katong were hard to distinguish due to shared colour characteristics, they varied in saturation, with Little India having the highest saturation and Katong the lowest. After the analysis, we tried to produce the actual packaging of gifts and brochures by using the colour palettes to verify its practical effectiveness for people who have different cultural backgrounds in Singapore. We will be conducting further experiments investigating the effects of colours of products’ packaging on their sales. This research could be applied for tourists to understand and enjoy colour townscape formed by Singapore's unique historical and cultural background. Additionally, these outcomes could be useful to add extra value to products created by Made with Passion [1], a national initiative jointly led by Singapore Tourism Board and Enterprise Singapore in the future.