Light is the only energy we can see, and we see it in the form of colour
WallTherapy is the first public launch of Fabiane Perrella and Rachel Wingfield bringing together design and science.
It brings together many areas of design with neuroscience and colour science and we believe this fusion will create entirely new branches within design and could also provide new ways of informing several areas of science. This is essentially a research project aimed at developing a new design methodology for highly individualistic, end-user created designs that can have a positive effect on their environment.
WallTherapy is an empirical exploration of the neurological, cognitive and contextual bases underpinning the impact of visual stimuli such as colour and light and how people's mood can be expressed in design through a creative, scientifically-led design process.
WallTherapy enables everyone to create their own highly individual personal environment from their psychophysically determined colour preferences to suit and possibly enhance people's sense of well-being. It is well established in scientific literature that ambient colour, light and texture can affect mood and behaviour this is why a conventional decorative surface, such as wallpaper has been chosen as the interface for this experiment, We intend to extend this process into many areas of design beyond our initial wall therapy wallpaper.
We anticipate that in the finished wallpaper product everyone will have been prescribed a personal colour, pattern and texture and then wall therapy will allow them to do one of two things: Either, allow them to paint the wallpaper themselves with all the therapeutic benefits painting affords or print out a wallpaper that has been specifically designed by and is essentially 'prescribed' for that person, couple or family who will live with it.
We created a unique 'group' version of wall therapy especially for Designersblock at London Design Festival September 2003, where the wallpaper is collectively created by the visitors to the exhibition. We invited everyone to participate in this experiment in order to observe the resulting ambience and 'mood' of the show and the people who contributed. For this event we chose the landscape ourselves and invited everyone to find their 'neurological' colour preferences using our short psychophysical test, and then apply their chosen colours to the overall group wall therapy wallpaper.
Designersblock
Bury St Edmunds
Related research nodes
Dinshah Ghadiali, Cured by colour
Chromo-therapy in action,
using the Kromayer lamp, 1938.
Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Washington. Reproduced by permission of Actinic Press, Malvern
Colour therapy
Colour tests
Color Quiz is a free five minute personality test based on decades of research by color psychologists around the world. There are no complicated questions to answer, you simply choose colors with a click of the mouse
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RachelWingfield - 10 Dec 2003
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