Colour Literacy Forum. Color & the Perceiver

The Colour Literacy Forum is an international, collaborative effort to align university-level colour education with current design needs in the culture. The goal of the Forum is to connect faculty, students, and administrators with interdisciplinary professionals to provide cutting-edge research, curricula, tools, and resources.

The Colour Literacy Forum is a virtual gathering featuring presentations and discussions related to updating and expanding colour education in art and design programs at the university level. The forum convenes for three events per year to share information and offer dynamic networking opportunities for participants.

Register using the button at left. For complete details visit Colour Literacy Project.

Color & the Perceiver

Join us for Colour Literacy Forum #5: Color & the Perceiver. This event will take place as a hybrid gathering –– in person at Color Impact 2023 and also online via Zoom.

Color is a perceptual experience, and each perceiver has a unique point of view. In this forum, our speakers will investigate the relationship between color vision and visual literacy, which can be described as our ability to navigate through the world using information provided by our visual system, our memories, and other sensory input.

Be part of the forum to learn how color perception works, and why designers from all industries need to be aware of variations in color vision among the population –– to realize the real-world applications that can enhance our well-being and ensure access to resources for everyone.

Talk 1: Colour Communication From Design to Production

Accurate and fast colour communication technology has been highly desired to achieve supply chain management. A system has been developed to achieve this by accurately simulating total appearance of the final product by projecting coloured light on white substrates. The appearance of the virtual samples can be precisely reproduced between systems.

Designers can invent colours based on a colour selection tool and can visualise the same colour on multiple textured substrates. Colour specifiers can make crucial selection decision to finalise a digital colour specification. Dyers can accurate reproduce physical swatches to match the specification. Examples will be given to show how colours to be designers, to be specified, and to be reproduced.

Dr. Ming Ronnier Luo is a Professor at the College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University (China). He received his PhD from the Bradford University (UK) on colour science in 1986. He has published over 750 peer reviewed papers in the fields of colour science, imaging science and illumination engineering. He is a Fellow of Society of Dyers and Colouists (SDC) and of Imaging Science and Technology (IS&T) . He has been an active member of CIE, ex-VP, ex-Division Director on Colour and Vision, Technical chairs. He has received numerous awards, including the Judd 2017 Award from the International Colour Association (AIC), and the Newton 2020 Award from the Colour Group of the Great Britain for his contribution in colour science research.

Talk 2: The Role of Context and Memory in Colour Experience

Colour sensation arises through comparing the activation from more than one retinal photoreceptor type in visual information processing. Typical human observers have three types of cone photoreceptors sensitive to long, medium, and short wavelengths of visible light, producing a fundamentally three-dimensional colour representation. Our colour experience, however, cannot be fully explained by information processing at these early stages. The spatial and temporal context in which a stimulus is viewed, as well as previous experience with coloured stimuli affect how a given colour appears to a given observer. In other words, the physical properties of a coloured stimulus do not determine its colour appearance. In this talk I will first review the basic physiology of colour vision and then move on to discuss the ways perceptual context, short- and long-term memory, and prior knowledge interact with sensory information to create our colour experience.

I will also touch on how these factors may give rise to individual differences in colour perception.

Dr. Maria Olkkonen holds a PhD in natural sciences from Justus- Liebig University Giessen and is currently a Principal Color Scientist at Microsoft as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki. Before joining Microsoft, Dr. Olkkonen worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University, and as an assistant professor at Durham University, UK. Her research focuses on human visual perception with a specialization in color perception and color constancy. She is especially interested in
how short- and long-term memory affects and interacts with the perception of color. She uses behavioral methods to investigate perceptual responses to images and to quantitatively characterize the computational mechanisms of perception. She is a co-founder of the UK-based Colour Collective and a member of the Finnish Color Group.

This forum is the third in a 4-part series about color perception. Forum #3 focused on color and light; Forum #4 explored color and materials.