ChromaZone Workshop

I participated in a daylong workshop held on campus at our Color Materials Trim Exploration Laboratory (or CMTEL) along with a mixed audience of color design professionals, ArtCenter faculty and other ArtCenter students. The goal of the workshop was to work together to help contribute research that would shape the Color Marketing Group's 2017 World Color Forecast, for the year 2019.  

The organizers asked us to come up with our own personal forecast stories to bring to the event.  I had yet to create a CMF palette, so it was exciting to give it a shot.  I'm not sure how well these turned out.  Here is what I came up with - 3 themes of escapism: One of hedonistic escape, one of quiet solitude, and one of healing escape.



We were split into a number of different teams, with which we presented and discussed our individual work.  Themes within our group emerged, that we later presented to the entire workshop.

As we conversed in the open discussion, CMG members were taking copius amounts of notes while also guiding the group through the discussion..  

Some repeat topics came up between our groups to become our main 3 themes: Childlike/Fun, Meditation/Restoration, and Authenticity/Trust.

We pulled all swatches that everyone had brought with them and as a group matched them to each theme.

Out of the three it was interesting to see which ones brought out the most suggestions and which had least consensus.  The emotional value of each color made it a time consuming process to get to a reduced number.  

"It's like choosing which child to leave behind!" exclaimed one participant.

Once we had pared down to the essentials, Sandy took us through last year's workshop swatches and we eliminated any that skewed too closely to what had been shown before, further reducing the number.  It was uncanny how similar the colors were to the year before...

We finally reduced to the 16 slots.  

The next step was to write the stories to establish and ground each theme, as well as naming each color and describing each to match the theme.  This too, was a surprisingly complex process.  While the color-naming team experience was lighthearted poetic description writing, the storywriting was more serious as it had to resonate with the research as well as provide a kind of narrative for the user to imagine themselves in the mindset of the theme.

I'm not sure how closely this resembles reality of the everyday work of these companies, but I left the workshop with an appreciation for the research and consideration that goes into the color predictions churn every year.  In addition, I was able to meet some students and faculty from other majors and schools that I would never otherwise have had the chance to cross paths with.  Definitely a rewarding experience!