International Colour Day 2023 – Belgium
On March 19 2023, ICA-Belgium celebrated International Colour Day (ICD) with an online event. Watch the recordings.
On March 19 2023, ICA-Belgium celebrated International Colour Day (ICD) with an online event. ICD celebrations aim to develop awareness of the importance of colour phenomena and culture in the broad domains of Art and the Humanities, Science, and Technology. For this occasion we have invited several guest speakers, each of whom is an expert in colour in their field. We invite you to sit back and enjoy our talks with Anat Lechner (Huedata Inc), Julia Hausmann (Farbarchitektur), and Alexandra Loske (museum curator).
Anat Lechner | Color Design in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
Julia Hausmann | The fourth dimension – Colour in dialogue with art and architecture
Alexandra Loske | Lives in colour: Pioneering women in colour history
Anat Lechner Color Design in the age of Artificial Intelligence.
We’re at a new age where Artificial Intelligence is becoming the most influential General Purpose Technology (GPT), a technology that once arrived, is poised to morph all aspects of our lives, irreversibly. Artificial Intelligence rapidly moves into the mainstream, demonstrating greater production efficiencies, greater marketing precision/personalization, and at times, greater creative design output than what humans generate. As this cross-industry disruption escalates, designing products, brands, and environments is being challenged.
Traditionally, design decisions relied heavily on personal preference, educated intuition, anecdotal experience, company-internal data, and/or costly market research. But advancements in big data/analytics and Generative AI call for the integration of new capabilities into the design process to better inform, inspire and validate design decisions. I will review the emergent Generative AI applications in product, brand, urban, and experience designs, and will then center on data-driven color design decision processes. Introducing the Huedata platform, I will share new color decision practices and close with implications to color design leaders as they work to enhance and solidify their companies’ creative capabilities, data assets, design decision processes, and talent bench strength.
Affiliation
Anat Lechner, PhD, Professor of Business at the Stern School of Business, NYU, and Co-Founder of Huedata, Inc., a Color Intelligence Company.
Anat Lechner, PhD, is a Professor of Business at the Stern School of Business, New York University where she focuses on disruptive innovation and strategic change. She is also the co-founder of Huedata Inc., the Color Intelligence Company that provides color data and analytics to designers, strategists and researchers to aid product, brand and environment design decisions. A former Researcher at McKinsey & Co. Dr. Lechner has advised global Fortune 100 firms in the Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Energy, Food, Technology, design and Retail industries. She has numerous appearances in NYT, WSJ, Forbes, BBC, Time and other premier global media outlets. Anat holds an MBA and a PhD in Organization Management from Rutgers University, NJ.
Julia Hausmann The fourth dimension – Colour in dialogue with art and architecture
The myth of white modernism has persisted and thus the architecture of the 1920s and 1930s is generally not associated with colour. At the same time, architects and designers were pursuing a holistic approach to interior design, where colour played an important role as the fourth dimension. Architecture, design and art were not seen separated and art was therefore an integral part of interior design. The corresponding functionalist interior of representative houses was fitted in high-quality custom-made products.
Architect Julia Hausmann is particularly fascinated by Scandinavian modernism with its very own design language and timeless beauty. During her studies, she has delved deeply into the modernist projects of Le Corbusier, as well as his art and the resulting Architectural Polychromy, which is until today a perfect colour keyboard to be used in architectural colour design. In her lecture she takes a look at two special Scandinavian private houses from the 1930s which now work as museums. Using an own project example, she explains how she deals with colour and art in the existing interior of an art collector’s villa.
After graduated from school, Julia Hausmann spent one year at a private Art Academy before she started to study interior design and architecture in Wuppertal.
Later, she moved to Berlin where she studied at the Universität der Künste and the Technische Universität. She graduated within the master class of Matthias Sauerbruch, owner of Sauerbruch Hutton architects, one of the leading German architects working on colour in architecture.
After her studies she started working in international architecture offices in the Netherlands (in Rotterdam and Amsterdam) in the fields of interior design, architecture and urban planning.
Back in Germany she worked in an office with an affinity for Dutch architecture and focused on colour and material in different projects.
In 2015 she founded her own office FARBARCHITEKTUR and besides her project work, Julia is a speaker on the topic of colours and materials. Since August last year she is the Vice-President of the German Colour Association “Deutsches Farbenzentrum”.
Alexandra Loske Lives in colour: Pioneering women in colour history
We associate many milestones in colour history with men, for example Isaac Newton, George Field, Goethe, Chevreul, Itten, Kandinsky and many others. Examples of women writing about colour are rare before the twentieth century. In this talk Alexandra Loske will introduce some women who wrote and published on colour and colour theory in the 19th and early 20th century and investigate what motivated them and how they claimed their place in the colour canon. The talk will focus particularly on how they illustrated their works, including the surprisingly abstract colour blots of British flower painter Mary Gartside (1805) and the highly inventive colour grids of New York art teacher Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1901). The talk will finish with early 20th century artist and writer Carry van Biema (1881-1942), whose life and work were brutally extinguished by the Nazis during WW2.
Dr Alexandra Loske is an art historian, writer, and museum curator with a particular interest in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European art and architecture. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the use of colour in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, where she is now curator. Alexandra has lectured and published widely on the subject of colour. Her major book Colour – A Visual History (2019, Ilex/Tate/Smithsonian Institute), has been translated into German and French. She is the editor of a volume on colour in the nineteenth century for The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Color (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and is currently writing a large book on colour concepts for TASCHEN. In 2014 she curated the exhibition Regency Colour and Beyond 1785 – 1845 at the Royal Pavilion, and she contributed to the exhibition Turner et la Couleur in Aix-en-Provence and the Turner Contemporary in Margate (2016/17). Her research into women in colour history is supported by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex:
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr/research/womenincolourhistory