Walking down a street in North London last week, I spotted this chair in a store window. Ice cream for the eye! It had me wondering why we “hold back” on color so much. I’ve often resisted the urge to wear colorful clothes for example. Why are we sometimes color restrained? And, what does this chair suggest to us in terms of ways to use color more effectively in everything we do? In our innovation projects?
This picture goes into my “forced association” picture deck, so, I can use it as a tool for ideation, but what else?
I recall that Motorola once had a huge success with pagers with color. By simply adding color it opened up the consumer market in what had previously been pretty much the domain of doctors and delivery men.
So, think about color. It doesn’t have to go in your living room!
7 responses to “Color as Stimulus for Creativity & Innovation”
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I love this chair! But then, I am a bit of a colour-junkie. My husband frequently describes my forays into home decorating as resembling something done by “a drunk clown on acid!” (LOL!) so, sadly, I would never get away with having it in my home.
I think, perhaps, we restrain our colourful inclinations because we are afraid to stand out too much. It’s the “tallest tree catches the wind” mindset – it’s risky. It is perhaps the same reason we make ourselves “smaller” because of the misplaced idea that this will make others feel “bigger”.
I also think it is perhaps a cultural thing? It seems that the more emotionally restrained a culture is, the “quieter” their colour choices seem to be.
As for how I use colour, well, I have a job that involves taking lots of notes, as well as a great deal of “thinking” and design-type work. As a concession to my colour-wild side, use coloured pens for all my scribbling. I have lots of pens. And by lots I mean that I might have as many as 100 different pens (I haven’t counted…recently) – in in at least as many colours. I literally have a pen for every occasion – from psychedelic whiteboard markers all the way through to an ordinary black ball-point (used only for writing cheques and filling in government forms…).And I carry most of my pen collection around with me all the time. (OK, so my handbag is a little heavy…)
I also avoid using lined paper (life is too short to be constrained by other peoples’ lines ;-)). This is mainly because I often need to use pictures, diagrams and mind maps to make my notes. Also, if I can find them, I try to use notebooks with coloured pages. I once even had one with black pages. This of course, required that I use those weird “milky” gel pens to write in it. Of course you can imagine my delight at “needing” to buy more pens that worked work with my new notebook…
Interestingly, my pen fetish seems to have caught on at my office…my colleagues now complain if we don’t have enough coloured whiteboard markers. Which means that I always have an excuse to buy more…Yay!
No, Gregg, I am not completely insane. Heck, what can I say? Some women buy shoes, I buy pens…
Penny,
I always knew there was something about you…
I too have something of a thing for pens. I am a huge fan of Faber Castell drawing pens, love the very fine tipped ones, but also the brush styles ones and have a drawer full. When traveling I have a subset of about 30, and, drawing pencils, erasers, a sharpener, etc. And…my notebooks are all unlined.
The black notebook with white ink sounds like a real treat…have to find one!
[…] color is creativity? Posted on 9 June 2010 by Roy Jacobsen Gregg Fraley asks “Why are we sometimes color restrained?“ Walking down a street in North London last week, I spotted this chair in a store window. Ice […]
Gregg,
So, are you going to buy that chair?
I just might buy that chair.
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