Title: Discovering chances for cross-cultural colour design

Authors: Gyoung Soon Choi, Ruediger Oehlmann, David Cottington

Addresses: Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT1 2QJ, UK. ' Faculty of Computing, Information Systems and Mathematics, Kingston University London, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT1 2EE, UK. ' Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Kingston University London, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT1 2QJ, UK

Abstract: Chance Discovery focuses on opportunities and risks for future decision making. An ongoing research program involves the discovery of colour preferences of English and Korean users, which are considered as opportunities for cross-cultural design. The results have shown that Korean participants prefer soft, bright, pastel tone colours and formed more associations related to emotions and nature whereas English participants prefer strong, dark, dull, intense colours and formed more associations with artificial concept categories, such as man-made objects. The subsequent results showed that English users recognised a wide range of different colour/meaning combinations whereas Korean users recognised a narrower range.

Keywords: chance discovery; colour semantics; free association; recognition tasks; cross-cultural meshing; culture; colour design; colour preferences; English users; Korean users; meaning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2010.030532

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2010 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.140 - 158

Published online: 21 Dec 2009 *

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