Coloured Patterns: Designing Urban Spaces Through Chromatic Abstractions

Abstract

Contemporary urban policies increasingly experiment with a bottom-up approach that starts from the social base of the city, focusing on the interests and perceptions of the inhabitants and building on citizen participation, which becomes an important cognitive-operational tool [Acierno 2019]. The involvement of the population can be useful in understanding the criticalities and conditions considered most pleasant in urban parks, areas where issues of enjoyment and the search for psychophysical well-being are concentrated. In these cases, the use of images proves to be a very useful investigative tool for understanding subjective reactions to certain visual stimuli, especially colour, in order to identify the elements that create the most significantly positive effects on the visual perception of public space. Learning from images, therefore, to define guidelines for future design. An experimental test was used to assess subjects’ perceptions of specific colour combinations from existing urban locations in order to identify the most pleasant and relaxing ones. Thus, the contemporary city offers the possibility of working from below: the community expresses itself through subjective reactions to abstract images that propose different colour palettes. Reflection on the perceptual aspects of the chromatic components of urban spaces falls within the research area of the “psychology of colour”, which investigates how different colours stimulate the human mind, provoking particular emotions and specific states of mind, thus attempting to understand the effects on psychological functioning, which are a function of social behaviour [Elliot, Maier 2014] and psychophysical wellbeing. The image thus represents that synthesis of perceptive experience that can become generative of conscious strategies of design and use, in search of positive aesthetic and visual conditions.