Chapter One: Understanding Colour and its Perception
How individuals perceive and understand colour depends greatly on how one experiences colour through visual and physical existence. The way in which the human eye perceives colour, both artificial and natural, can be affected through the inevitable process of ageing and the age-related deficiencies which occur. With a rapidly ageing population, these deficiencies can greatly affect how one experiences their environment. Thus, special consideration must be undertaken into the choice of colours used within spatial design in order to create a comfortable and safe environment that promotes well-being and self-healing for our elderly.
What is colour? It is universally understood that colour is a visual perception that exists only in our brain, through a reflection of light. Sir Isaac Newton first observed, that objects do not possess physical colour, rather they reflect different wavelengths of light which stimulate certain parts of the human brain (Mahnke 1996: 95). Each wavelength is intercepted at different lengths, creating various colours. Colour can be perceived and experienced both objectively and subjectively; through physical existence and individual perception. The way colour is perceived can be further influenced by an individuals range of visual perception, which as later discussed can be additionally affected by the process of ageing. Chemist and mineralogist Kurt Nassau synthesises our understanding of colour as ‘three subtly different aspects of reality’. Firstly colour refers to the visual property of an object, for example ‘green grass’. Secondly, colour refers to the properties of light rays, as in ‘grass efficiently reflects green light… while absorbing light of other colours more or less completely’. Finally, colour defines a group of sensations as a result of the human eye’s perception and the brain’s interpretation of light reflecting upon an object to create a certain colour (Nassau 1997). Our understanding of the concept of colour can be approached from different perspectives and disciplines, such as art, the science of physics, colour theory and psychology (Mahnke 1996: 6). The way colour is experienced and understood in art is different from how it would be approached in colour theory, with specific colour associations and their theoretic meaning differing from how primary, secondary, warm and cool colours are associated and understood through the colour wheel. Nevertheless, there are similarities between these various disciplines, with a general understanding on how colour and its properties (saturation, hue, contrast) can influence an individual and their perception of a space or object (Mahnke 1996: 84). Colour theory and psychology has long been used to describe the relationship colour and the human mind have, with advances and explorations into how colour can be used to benefit an individual. This led to developments in chromotherapy and health care, generated by the work conducted by Edwin D.
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