An educational experience about color emotion and its design implications

The paper presents the context, 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 is part of a color design education research project with the aim to explore, evaluate, experiment and systematize design implications offered by the evaluation of the emotional response to color in design education and professional practice. Besides the educational purposes, this experience allowed us to verify, evaluate and compare the presence of associative recurrences between a selection of emotion words and color attributes, firstly with an initial exploration without using color samples, and secondly with the construction of contextualized 4-color combinations. Finally, in a process of student-learning and experimentation that moves from abstraction and generalization towards design contextualization, the possibility of using such experiences and connotative associations to build the emotional character of an interior space was explored. The results of this experience contribute to validating the design opportunities offered by the possibility of dealing with the evaluation of the emotional response to color in terms of color attributes, and thus of color combinations. In addition, the use of such associative assumptions to build the emotional character of an interior space seemed to be a useful educational and methodological tool to relate color to the other design components—shape, material and surface, in particular—and to show the potential value of a design process structured around color and the sensorial and emotional qualities of the environment.