Insights and Innovations from Clerkenwell Design Week
While visiting Clerkenwell Design Week 2024, the SASGO Marketing Team had the privilege of attending a series of captivating presentations that delved into the profound impact of colour on our sensory experiences, well-being, and workplace environments. Hosted at the Milliken Showroom, Laura Perryman, a renowned colour and design specialist and author of "The Colour Bible," presented her talk titled "Why Colour Matters." Additionally, we saw how the NCS+ collaboration with Tarkett has produced a useful design tool for interior designers and heard about how they are using virtual reality to design for dementia.
The Importance of 'Colourscapes' in Future Workplaces
Laura Perryman highlighted the concept of colourscapes and their importance in shaping future workplaces. Colourscapes go beyond visual aesthetics, creating layered, immersive environments that enhance our sensory experiences. By improving our understanding of colour, we can unlock deeper usability and create more meaningful spaces.
Perryman emphasised the dual nature of colour, comprising both its qualities (how it looks and feels) and benefits (how it affects our senses and behaviours). Colour impacts the relationships we have with spaces. For example, how they make us feel - nurturing pinks are organic, warming, and reassuring, fostering a sense of calm and safety. The unseen responses, affecting our senses and behaviours - nurturing pinks can lower heart rates, reduce anxiety, and are non-toxic. The popular trend of inviting corals has the qualities of being earthy, organic or warm and the benefits are they are energising and improve alertness.
"Neuro-aesthetics", a term Perryman explored, refers to how aesthetic experiences, such as colour, trigger emotional and physiological responses. Engaging with colour can release feel-good chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, enriching our sensory experiences. The Colour Bible is available on Amazon.
Colour Trends and their impact
Perryman discussed shifts in colour trends, noting that geographical boundaries are becoming less significant. The modern work environment requires a deeper understanding of our minds and bodies, with a focus on mental and physical wellness to attract people back to the office.
- Natural Rhythms: There is a societal shift towards appreciating the natural world and restoring the planet. This includes the use of healthier materials and co-creating with natural sources. Forever greens, are a "must-have" colour group, embodying this trend, reflecting biophilia and the natural cycle.
- Fostering Communities: Designing spaces that promote human-centric interactions and community-building is vital. Inviting coral colours, such as coral reds, soft oranges, and warm browns, create welcoming atmospheres and help achieve this.
- Calm and Neurosensory: Creative professionals need quiet, focused environments to perform their best work. Powerful neutral colours, such as warm, natural neutrals, are essential for setting a truly this tone, enhancing focus and productivity.
Our key takeaway is the need to stay updated with colour trends that prioritise well-being and sustainability. Incorporating these trends can lead to healthier, more productive, and more appealing environments.
Tarkett and NCS+: Enhancing Colour Selection in Flooring Design
NCS+ is a comprehensive digital colour platform tailored for designers and architects, enabling them to enhance their creative workflows. The platform offers tools for colour extraction from images, translation of colour notations to various formats, and scanning physical objects to acquire NCS notations. Designers can create, merge, and export colour palettes compatible with popular design software, ensuring cohesive and accurate colour representation. NCS+ also supports collaboration by facilitating the sharing and management of colour projects and moodboards. In other words, as demonstrated to us, an inspirational image discussed with the client / or object you or they particular want to focus on, can be analysed in terms of its colour palette and suggested colours for flooring, wall colours and soft furnishings will be proposed to create a moodboard for further discussion.
Recently, NCS+ announced a partnership with Tarkett. This collaboration integrates Tarkett’s extensive range of flooring products with NCS+’s advanced colour tools. This allows designers to instantly see which floorcovering work well with their chosen image, object or concept of colour. The tool can also be used to analyse colours within a floor covering and reverse the process.
Tarkett is enabling dementia-friendly design by using virtual reality (VR) to simulate living with dementia. Their "Through Their Eyes" VR platform provides designers with insights into the daily challenges faced by dementia patients, promoting better design decisions. Key principles include using subtle patterns, appropriate contrasts, and specific light reflectance values to improve spatial perception and reduce anxiety. Tarkett’s flooring and wall solutions aim to enhance orientation, safety, and comfort for elderly residents, fostering a supportive and navigable environment.
Going forward!
Clerkenwell Design Week 2024 offered invaluable insights into the transformative power of colour in design, and the importance of not only understanding how it looks, but how it impacts on the way people feel. We saw that some of the brighter autumnal colours from last year are now more muted, and discussion included the idea of warm natural neutrals, and how that can impact focus, providing quiet spaces and not bombarding the senses. While the importance of this can be considered in terms of neurodiversity, it is also important to balance colour in a way that aids disability as well as diversity. Sustainability and use of natural materials remain part of the agenda and will continue to do so for many years to come, but it was great to see more focus on texture and a more muted and yet lighter colour palette, starting to be showcased by the main flooring manufacturers.