Uncertain Beauty — What Colour is Design?
Method showcased real-time colour trends emerging from social media surrounding the London Design Festival 2016
What colour is the London Design Festival? This interactive installation extracted colour data from daily image posts during the festival, comparing different colour palettes, and uncovering the most popular colours throughout the week.
As an image came in, the colours were pulled from the image, with one colour appearing on each screen. The last screen showed the developing colour palette. Displayed in the Tea Building reception, courtesy of Derwent London, the interactive exhibit was transportable and packed up at the end of each day, revealing a simple idea with very complex execution requirements.
As a design studio, Method helps navigate uncertainty. Through a strategy and approach of ‘make, test, learn’, we were able to explore the uncertainty of the colours of the design festival, and make data meaningful and relevant to people in their everyday lives, while celebrating colour in an interesting way.
The Approach
Instagram acted as our source of images through other designers’ work. Any image with the hashtag #LDF16 got sampled and a colour palette of the 5 most dominant colours got extracted.
Colours were then displayed on the 5 screens (one colour per screen) and a name got assigned to them from a database of 1639 colours based on their HEX values. The last screen displayed the aggregation of all the colours that have been sampled from the Instagram feed. From afar it displayed a palette of the 10 most dominant colours of the festival.
Visitors can investigate each screen by walking up to it. The colours will transition from solid colour, to coloured pixels on a grayscale image, and then to the original image that was used a sampling base. We are inspired by the idea that the colour ‘palettes’ are being driven by other designer’s colour choices, and are also filtered by the public choosing what they think is best by posting on Instagram.
The installation has been composed of two parts, the front end — written in Processing and running on Raspberry PI computers — and the backend — written in Python and running on Heroku.
Every 5 minutes the back-end service pulled new images from the instagram feed into our server, extracted their palettes, stored the image data and updated the queue that’s served to the Raspberry PI of the installation.
The Outcome
We’ve made every part of the installation in-house including coding, wiring, sensors, screens (old display monitors), and stands. We used a mix of recycled and raw materials and hacked parts of them to make the installation work. In a world where we are so used to seeing ‘slick’ super high production products such as iPhones, it was inspiring to build something ourselves from scratch.
This exhibition provoked questions about how data around us can guide our choices as designers and how we can use new tools in a world of constant digital change. Through this work, we investigated specifically how designers can extract larger meaning from the data that surrounds us. The mixing of insightful ideas, programming, hard wiring, and physical aesthetic is core to the maker culture at Method.
The most dominant colours of this year’s London Design Festival were:
– Violet blue: 179,95,157
– Cerulean blue: 37,78,164
– Waikawa Grey: 91,109,149
– Laurel: 101,132,103
– Shakespeare: 91,153,170
– Apple Blossom: 173, 77, 73
– Gimlet: 177, 159, 95
– Tower Grey: 169, 162, 161
– Westar: 214,208,198
