Colour communication challenges: Exploring disciplinary divides

Sixteen students were involved in an experiment to describe the appearance of colour samples. These students were divided into two groups: design background and chemistry/engineering background.Design participants react to samples with images and adjectives describing their feelings and emotions.They tend to use evocative, emotional, and associative terms which are also related to use of a wide variety of semantic fields. On the other hand, chemistry/engineering participants focused heavily on colour and surface objectively. Although they used limited sematic fields compared to design participants, they used more precise language in their description. In terms of describing the process of changing the appearance of one sample to another, participants from chemistry/engineering used technical terms and described the process more systematically in comparison to the design participant group. The main focus of this research was to investigate differences in colour communication between participants from the disciplinary backgrounds. These comparisons are not intended to suggest negative or positive judgements by the researchers but to describe the different values of these participants. This research provides evidence that people from different disciplines who need to collaborate in colour design use different colour vocabularies.