An educational experience on the exploration and experimentation of colour associations and relationships

The following article describes the results of an educational experience conducted within the Color and Perception course at the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano, in the academic years 2013/2014 and 2014/2015. The students were asked to work on the creation of colour palettes associated with a selection of “evocative terms”, or keywords, which found a more or less extensive recurrence in literature and experimental research that addresses synesthetic associations of colour. Next, the students’ works went through a review process in order to evaluate the actual presence of associative recurrences, and thus their relevance in the attributes of hue, lightness, and saturation. This check was carried out for each keyword using the NCS - Natural Colour System1. Where the number of reference samples proved to be sufficiently interesting to support assessments, the results showed how for some keywords there was a clear association recurrence in the nuance and/or hue.