Experience and understand colors with all your senses
To learn about the effect of colors, you have to experience them with all your senses, feel them, touch them, smell them, taste them, shape them and move them. The multisensory effects of colors are revealed in creative analytical experiments. Over a period of 10 days, around 500 design students carried out experimental studies on the sensory effects of 13 different colors, which describe the most important sensory areas of the perceptible color space in terms of their meaning. The individual exercises had to be carried out within one day in field trials in which ingredients had to be collected, compiled according to quality, evaluated, processed and prepared with a focus on one color. Each participant concentrated on one color in their study, whereby the holistic nature of the spectrum could be experienced through the daily comparison of experiences within the 10 days. After the 10 days, its color was usually so intensely present that it became part of the entire daily routine and was even experienced in dreams. During the entire study period, around 1 million images were taken, of which a preselection was made by the students for further analysis.
Order out of complexity
The effect of the colors changes with the context, which rules out laboratory tests and requires the use of a complex and time-consuming examination method. As a result, around 1,000,000 thematic images from these studies were evaluated, from which the semantic order of the sensory-specific effects of colors presented here was developed. The entire socio-cultural and natural human environment is colorful, which is why the deductive method of investigation is based on the recording and gradual reduction of complexity. Through the comparative evaluation of the image material over a period of several years, new categories could be formed, with the help of which the effect of the colors could be systematically described. The series of studies and the evaluation have been running since 2006 in the design/artistic basics FARBE LICHT RAUM (Color Light Space) with Prof. Dr. Axel Buether at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle.
Suggestion to try out the color effects
The semantic order of the color space shown makes no claim to completeness, as it can only show a section of the diversity of the natural and cultural living environment that surrounds us. The didactic approach to the phenomenon of color shown here is intended to encourage teachers and students to take a new path towards an experimentally creative and at the same time systematically analytical approach to the phenomenon of color by critically examining the content and systematization shown. The untested acceptance of the correlations shown here prevents the acquisition of experience, which is why all readers are hereby requested to critically scrutinize the observations and conclusions and to verify, improve and supplement them through their own experiments
