InfoD-Cafe: Colour and wayfinding

[Swanson, Gunnar]

This is way outside my expertise but it seems like there are a few interacting factors:

1) The "primitive" black and white visual system activates/works with the amigdula. It works faster but hardly "more effectively" by various standards. There's an assumption that strong emotions might be better triggered by a system that affects the "lizard" brain, but stimulating the amigdula would be no improvement on, say, analysis.

2) The quicker reaction to value differences would be relevant in basketball or gunfights but not, say, in directional signage (except when driving at very high speeds.)

3) Using value and hue contrast both adds even more distinction. It may be an over-simplification but what we really see is difference.

I hope I'm not making too big of a fool of myself pontificating about stuff that I know so little about. I suspect that we have many list members who actually know something about this so I'll shut up now.

Gunnar
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
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Greenville, North Carolina 27858

gunnar at gunnarswanson.com
+1 252 258 7006

at East Carolina University:
+1 252 328 2839 
swansong at ecu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: infodesign-cafe-bounces at list.informationdesign.org on behalf of elizabeth.lomas
Sent: Fri 8/29/2008 3:44 PM
To: Discussions about information design
Subject: RE: InfoD-Cafe: Colour and wayfinding
 
It has been really interesting to read everyone's discussions on signage. I know that situation is key and also being able to see signs in dark conditions and all weathers would be a factor. I also accept the issues surrounding neutral imagery. My question came from a psychology lecture I attended by Evelyn Mohr. She explained that in the 1980s and 1990s psychologists thought that the brain responded more effectively to simple black and white images but that now it has been realised that this is not the case.  
 
The details of her study are:
Colour Facilitates Naming of Real World Objects in Healthy and Aphasic Subjects
Adding chromatic information to pictures of objects shows only a small effect in verification and categorisation tasks. However, when observers are required to name objects, colour speeds performance and enhances accuracy. The present study contrasts two different theories as to why colour may benefit object naming. The first is that colour simply aids the segmentation of the object from its background. E.g., cherries pop out amongst the leaves of a cherry tree by their redness when presented as a coloured photograph, but not on a grey-scaled picture, where they must be segmented by differences in brightness and form. The second is that colour may help to elicit a wider range of associations with the object, thereby enhancing lexical access. To distinguish between these processes an equal number of pictures containing high and low colour diagnostic objects were presented against either fractal noise or uniform backgrounds in a naming task to aphasic subjects with anomia and to healthy controls. Performance for chromatic stimuli was compared with that for monochrome stimuli equated in luminance.
Others within her department have done a lot of research on recognition.
 <http://www.dur.ac.uk/psychology/staff/?id=589> http://www.dur.ac.uk/psychology/staff/?id=589
 
I therefore wondered whether there had been much similar research from a design perspective. The cards she highlighted as the standard tool for psychologists to discuss with patients looked really like road signage -this research is now resulting in moving away from these cards in favour of cards with photographs, colour etc. I was just really intersted to read more research about how colour and shape etc impact in design. It was good to get the references for 'green' = nature as a design tool.
 
Thanks for everyones links and thoughts.
 
Elizabeth Lomas
 

 

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