Wayshowing Through Urban Furniture: An Ergonomic Approach to a Color Planning Methodology

Abstract

This paper subject arises from a PhD research which defined the need to create a new methodology for urban furniture color planning. The present research is a Post-Doctoral project that aims to develop a methodology which purposes to establish the importance of a pertinent and structured color application to urban furniture, which will make possible to create color plans for urban environments, allowing urban furniture to stand out from its background, contributing for their better legibility, and transforming them in identification elements that will improve the orientation within the cities. The development and implementation of the new methodology will allow the determination, with a higher scientific approach and rigor, of the color planning to be applied to urban furniture in each district or urban area, of a city. The new methodology will be developed through an active research, focused in case studies, including three Portuguese cities with different specifications. For each city will be defined samples areas which will encompass the most representative city zones and, there, the new methodology will be applied to all urban furniture elements, in order to validate the results and the new city color planning.