Archive of Beautiful Colours or When the Doctrine was Overthrown by Lived Experience and Love

I am one of Schön’s practitioners in search for an ‘epistemology of practice’ (Schön 1984). Through my work I have identified an inconsistency in how designers work with colour and “the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks” (Schön 1984: viii). I use Design Driven Research, more specifically ‘Constructive Design Research’ (Koskinen et al. 2011) in the experiential epistemic tradition “where knowledge is generated from experiential insights and objects resulting from the design process” (Krogh & Koskinen 2021: 27), as framework for knowledge production. Through four series of experiments; ‘Personal Colour’, ‘Colour Narration’, ‘Material Colour’ and ‘Spatial Colour’ I explore how the notions of Colour Harmony and the notion of Atmosphere might influence a colour design process respectively.

For the ‘Archive of beautiful Colours’ presented at Ca2re Aarhus I have used the design method ‘Cultural Probes’ (Gaver et al. 1999) to collect insights from design professionals about what we consider to be beautiful colours.

I support the Constructive Design Research methodology with a phenomenological approach and supplement the applied design methods with autoethnographic methods. I apply this trinity of design, phenomenology and autoethnography to cross pollinate the two positions I hold: that of the designer and that of the researcher, and to ‘study with the practice’ (Ingold 2013) when trying to articulate embodied knowledge and create consistency between colour practice and colour theory.

Literature

Ingold, T. (2013) Making. Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge

Koskinen, I., Zimmerman, J., Binder, T., Redstrom, J. & Wensveen, S. (2011) Design Research through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom. Waltham: Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier

Krogh, P.G. & Koskinen, I. (2020) Drifting by Intention. Four Epistemic Traditions from within Constructive Design Research. Zürich: Springer

Schön, Donald A (1984) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Routledge.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. (1999) Design: Cultural probes. In: Interactions 6, 1 (Jan./Feb. 1999), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/291224...