Colour for Pricing

I was thinking about the way places like Yo!Sushi use colour to indicate price (dishes on different coloured plates cost different amounts and then the waiter counts up your empty plates at the end) and I thought how good it would be if the colour was used as an indicator of the total as you went along.

So I imagined a system where, for example, you enter into a computer the amount you would like to spend at the beginning of the meal and then as you order dishes the computer keeps a running total and the colour of your booth/table/place mat turns from one colour to another (through illumination) so you are automatically aware of how much money you are spending.

This would be a good thing for the customer but perhaps the bill awareness would not encourage restaurants to install this system! Perhaps it could be used to indicate time spent so it would encourage visitors with time restrictions. 

In terms of indicating the course of a set period of time, this could be used in other settings too such as a meeting room, gym, etc to avoid people having to keep looking at their watches.

Eg: a meeting is scheduled to last for 2 hours so the computer is programmed to change the colour of the ceiling from blue to green in the 1st hour and green to yellow in the 2nd hour. This way everyone has a clear consciousness of the passing of time and so schedules can be kept to more easily.

Your Rainbow Panorama by Olafur Eliasson

This is "Your Rainbow Panorama" by Olafur Eliasson. It sits on top of the ARoS museum of art and gives a panoramic view of the city of Aarhus in Danemark as visitors walk around it. As visitors walk around their view of the city is coloured in each colour of the spectrum in turn.

Essay Tutorial

So today i had a tutorial for the essays we have to write for January. They are only 2500 words so not a lot of space but it should be ok, we have to compare/contrast 2 practitioners. I've chosen to look at someone from the Modernist or Post-Modernist movement (where interiors are generally white white white) with either an earlier practitioner (where everything was very colourful and ornamented) or someone very contemporary where colour is beginning to come back in to fashion in interiors.
I want to explore the social backgrounds of the times and see how this and the artistic movement to which they belong affects the look of the interior and what theories led to these attitudes.
Should be interesting!

Inamo

Another example of personalise-able space through colour is the restaurant Inamo in Covent Garden. I was lucky enough to eat there a couple of years ago. It uses projectors above the table which project a "virtual table cloth" and an interactive menu onto the table top. You can scroll through the menu, order food and drinks and play games using a touch pad in the table.

http://www.inamo-restaurant.com/pc/gallery-photos.php

change of plans!

After a meeting with my heads of year, I have decided that my project will take a turn away from healthcare and more towards the effect of colour on people in other circumstances. This will give me a chance to look at other settings where colour is used to induce certain reactions in people.
I'm also interested in looking at interactivity in spaces in terms of colour and found this project called Interactive Kolsch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4L2SEd--GM (apologies - its in german - but you get the idea)

Which I thought was great and got me thinking about reactive lighting/colouring. Perhaps to react to temperature/amount of visitors/heart rate/time spent/sound levels etc. 

I've been thinking about how this could be used in conjunction with my research into colour and physical/emotional reactions... perhaps it could be used in an office space where if the worker is seeming to get bored or sleepy the colours react to be more stimulating, and if the worker seems stressed they react to be more calming.

adjustable colour films

this is a new idea that I had of using a coloured film on a roller system so that it can be rolled through the spectrum to colour the natural light of a window in different tints. I would imagine that only half of the window would be coloured with the film so that natural light is still allowed to reach the space.

References

Swanke Hayden Connell Architects - King's Mill Hospital (more info)

Phoenix Children's Hospital New Patient Care Tower – HKS Architects (more info)

The University of Minnesota Amplatz Children's Hospital – Tsoi/Kobus & Associates (more info)

I also found out about a charity called Paintings in Hospitals (link) which works to get paintings on the walls in hospitals through donations - they recognise that visual stimulation is important and also that the "hospital feel" has a negative effect on patients.

Diagrams

This is just a quick diagram I did to show the different ways we can perceive colour.

Another diagram to show my research on red and blue lighting.

A quick model I made to show how coloured glass (or a coloured film on glass) can be used to create colour. I have left half of the window clear so that natural light can also benefit the patient.