Colour: an experiential path between theory and practice

Abstract

Colour is one of the human activities with strong multidisciplinary characteristics. As we know, colour is a psycho-perceptive sensation that derives from lighting stimuli external to our brain, from the context in which we receive them, from our personal history and also from the cultural context in which we operate. In practical applications, colour is fundamental for many areas of human production. To name a few among the best known: industrial products, fashion, communication, interior and landscape design. Most of the time, professionals in these fields use different terms and different languages to refer to colour attributes. These difficulties are due to the intrinsic multidisciplinary nature of colour and to its many different possible applications and related technologies. Moreover, colours have emotional, cultural and symbolic valences and working with colour can sometimes look like a matter of personal preference. At the Italian Color Association, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano, in 2017 we designed and realised, with people coming from different countries, a post-graduate educational experiential path that starts from the scientific bases of physics, colorimetry and visual perception, passing through the intercultural aspects of colour, to get to design experiences in the contexts of communication, industrial production, landscape design, interior design and fashion design, which we present in this article.