As a healthcare Interior Designer, designing healthcare facilities, appropriate color selection is vital, yet often overlooked. Certainly among the important design features are good circulation, appropriate indoor/outdoor relationships, the proper use of materials, and code requirements. However, the purposeful and meaningful use of color has the power to enhance the value and effectiveness of a healthcare environment. Color, the visible spectrum of light, is a major element of our architectural settings and has significant psychological and physiological influences. Color is not just decoration, but is a means of communication and information. It influences the statement of our man-made spaces and enhances life experience.
To illustrate this concept, try this exercise: look outside and slowly remove color from everything you see. Turn the sky to a light grey, and the grass to a darker value. Paint grey the flowers, cars, trees, and birds. Imagine walking within this landscape and sense your emotional state. Frigid, stark, isolating describe this scene. Now in your minds eye restore each element to its original color and sense how you are feeling.
Color, as sensory information, is integral to human behavior and part of our conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Its affect on our emotions, thoughts, behavior, and language can not be ignored. Expressions such as “Im feeling in the pink”, “She was green with envy”, “Im feeling blue today”, or “I was so angry, I saw white” speak to this. Color and emotions, intricately connected, are part of our collective unconscious inherited from our human ancestors, and upon which we depended for our primal survival.
A human being is not born a “blank slate”. He brings with him his primal responses and memories.
Color researcher demonstrates that color is a visual language shared by all human beings and elicits universal innate emotions. Eighty eight percent of us, regardless of age, nationality, or culture, have similar color associations to emotional and conceptual responses. These associations are: red/pink = love, passion, anger and life (blood is our life force); yellow = happiness; orange = extreme joviality; life and healing = green; peace and tranquility = blue and blue/green; purple = royalty; black/grey = danger, death, and hatred; and white references cleanliness and virtue.
In reality, only the purest, most saturated blues, yellows, and reds create extreme biological effects, resulting in anger, aggression or depression. Mid tones and pastels have more associative effects, known as the psychosomatics of color psychology. These primitive associations explain why color can effect mood.
In designing healthcare settings, mood creation is vital. The major consideration is the associative influence one makes with a particular color and the psychosomatics involved. The question is “how will this color make one feel?” Another concern is the use of color as a communicator. It is informational and the designer must analyze signals and information which one will receive from the environment. Environmental cueing is necessary in wayfinding and maneuvering within the environment, especially when an individual may be in a heightened state of stress and anxiety. Color contributes to the stimulative nature of the space, which asks how welcoming the setting is and how it will meet ones health and emotional needs?
Applied color psychology is utilized to produce a visual ambience that will benefit the psychological and physiological well-being of the users: the patients, their families, and the staff. The correct and purposeful use of color can minimize the institutional look, create the impression of medical competence and efficiency, reinforce the feeling of emotional nurturance, and reduce apprehension and anxiety. It aides in promoting the healing process by guarding the emotional well-being of the patient, while supporting orientation and wayfinding, defining specific areas of function within the setting, and contributing to the visual ergonomics or comfort of the space.
