77. Human-Centric Approach to Study Colour in Design Education

Colour is an integral part of the design and thus of design education. The six-decade-old design learning on colour in Indian design schools still depends on the twentieth century modernist formulations explored by the Bauhaus school. Design implies symbols and languages that finally interact with the user, making design majorly dependent on colour vision. Types and processes of such interactions vary from user to user, context to context, and culture to culture. Thus, the diversity of these aspects impacts the function of colour or its role through such interactions further impacting the choices, communication, visuality, behaviour, culture, and decision in human life. India has been a vast, diverse country having multiple socio-cultural, ecological, and geographical contexts on colour relevance existing simultaneously with culturally or indigenously conditioned diverse meanings and associations. This paper proposes that teaching/learning of colour as taught in Indian design schools needs to be more inclusive and cognizant of human factors. It was felt that decolonization of design education needs to be done and a more inclusive approach, with humans as the centre needs to be developed. This paper outlines the methods and tools adopted by two NID faculty to conduct an experiment with first-year Postgraduate design students to see how this can be undertaken. Since this was during the COVlD-19 lockdown, it can be safely said that these methods can be adopted online or offline.