Colour terms in the interior design process

Colour is a very important topic that interior designers need to consider. Considerable research has been conducted in the area of colour application in interior design; in this study we are concerned with colour terms in interior design, mainly the terms designers use and know about. Fifteen interior designers with varied professional backgrounds, but based in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Bahrain, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey), were interviewed. Previously we reported that fourteen out of fifteen designers stated that colour thinking and decision making take place at the early stages of their design processes; eight of them reported that colour takes place in the first step when meeting clients and starting the project (Attiah et al., 2014). This study documented 137 terms which the fifteen designers use whilst brainstorming and working on a design project; subsequent analysis of these terms could form a basis for understanding how interior designers communicate the abstract properties of colour as part of their design processes. In this paper we show how the 137 terms were categorised according to a framework of four categories of colour terms: emotional, descriptive, cultural and functional. In addition, seventeen words (scientists names and technical terms), which are widely used in colour science (such as: CIELAB, Saturation, Itten) were shown to the designers; their knowledge was shown to be incomplete.