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  Faculty Fellow Megan Callahan | Color Scraps

  Megan Callahan, Furniture Department, and RISD Color Lab

  As part of an ongoing project supported by the faculty fellowship, Callahan explores how color can be a guide in approaching the accumulation, organization and composition of scrap materials and waste-based making. View exhibition image gallery

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  An Architect's Toolkit for Color Theory

  Ella Knight, Architecture Department, RISD Color Lab, and Graduate Studies

  This graduate project (M-ARCH 23) investigates the discipline's relationship and valuation of the use of color to bring awareness to both implicit and explicit cultural biases within the architectural practice. It’s important to address that many of these notions have come from the student’s experiences living in the US, working with American Architects, and attending three different American schools of architecture. From her limited experience on the professional side, Knight has observed how paint colors and material finishes are put at the very end of the process and left to interior designers. In the actual design process, architects are all taught to start with modeling white boxes, taking after modernist pedagogy and giving preference to minimalist aesthetics. In American architectural education, color theory is not a required aspect of design curriculum. These Eurocentric biases towards color were coined “chromophobia” by David Batchelor in his book of the same name. The erasure of color from Greco-Roman architecture is an early example of chromophobia. Hellenistic architecture was vibrantly painted, but when studied centuries later European scholars disregarded the evidence of color; the Greeks were considered genius while bright colors were associated with the aesthetics of “savage nations,” (Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors). The false whiteness of antiquity then became idolized in Neo-Classical Architecture, further associating white with purity and supremacy, only to be later reinforced by modernists. View exhibition image gallery.

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  Faculty Fellow Hope Leeson | Colors of the Land

  Hope Leeson; History, Philosophy, + the Social Sciences Department; and RISD Color Lab

  An installation by Hope Leeson (botanist and part-time faculty for Liberal Arts Science and Landscape Design and Architecture), funded by a Color Lab Faculty Fellowship. The body of work represents a year-long investigation into natural dye colors given by plants indigenous to South Kingstown, Rhode Island. The color palette is an expression of the land’s changing seasons, the terroir, and presents the visual dialect of the land to viewers. On view March 1-April 7, 2023 in the Color Lab Picture Window Gallery at 30 N. Main Street, Providence, RI. View exhibition image gallery.

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  Interfacing with Technology

  Henry Spuria, Graphic Design Department, Industrial Design Department, and RISD Color Lab

  This fifth-year double-major graduate project (Graphic Design, Industrial Design) investigates the distinctive way we interface with designed objects; a flashing amber light signifies a warning, an RGB blue implicates the web, and a green app icon represents technical information. These design decisions imbue a psychological and behavioral framework onto everyday objects and interfaces we surround ourselves with. But what would happen if we, as designers, enabled users to assume the role and generate their colors, shapes, typography, or other design assets? This project aims to allow users to understand generative design through different variables and tools within the exhibition space. It also features a reading corner that presents research, analysis, and frameworks around user interaction and experience design so that we might better understand the politics, analytics, and parameters implicit in every designed object. Color is such a vital tool in the expression of designed things and assets, it’s also a historically politically embroiled medium of design and art-making; by presenting color as a variable, both in print and digital form, users can unlock a perspective on how to interface with color and technology. The technology we interface with daily is diffuse and counter-intuitive. What would it look like to return to familiar, tactile, and tangible interfaces to evoke results? In this world, where a dial controls a color value, a button controls the blur, and slider pages through imagery, designed objects are meant to be interacted with, hacked, and broken. In this world, textual information is meant to be processed, re-configured, and recombined. These elements, which straddle the physical and digital, culminate in an experience founded in the innate nature of design; whether the design is textual, colorful, informational, or expressive, it is all meant to be made and remixed. View exhibition image gallery.