Color and the emotional characther of interiors

The paper presents the contents and results of an educational experience conducted within the Shapes, Surfaces and Colours module of the Master in Furniture Design by Poli.Design, Politecnico di Milano, in December 2018. This experience has allowed experimenting and evaluating the design implications related to the emotional response to color in terms of 4-color combinations and the possibility of using these experiences and connotative associations to build the emotional character of an interior. The students’ works were analyzed in part during the course process, to provide a basis for verification and shared discussion, and partly in retrospect, to verify and assess the presence of associative recurrences between the selected emotion words and the color attributes. The recurrent associations resulted from these verifications contribute to validate the possibility of dealing with the evaluation of the emotional response to color in terms of color combinations. In addition, the use of these associative assumptions to build the emotional character of the interiors, proved to be a useful didactic and methodological tool to relate color to the other design components, in particular to the shape, the material and the surface, and to show the potential value of a design process that is structured around the sensorial and emotional qualities of the environment.