At a point where I felt that I was getting lost in my own project, or more accurately, that I could no longer really find myself within it, I experienced a few things that reminded me of the value of communication. In a way, this brought me back to one of the fundamental purposes of the project itself: reinforcing open communication and fostering healthy, respectful and understanding ways of communicating with one another, while also creating space for us to better understand ourselves.
The gradual loss of colour from our surroundings, and particularly from the clothes and objects we interact with every day, has become a subject that has increasingly caught my attention. It is also something that I have started to see more and more people noticing. News outlets, YouTube videos, articles, scientific research and books have all begun discussing different aspects of how our visual environments are changing. People are becoming more aware of it, and I believe that awareness is the first step towards change.
With this project, I want to become part of that transition from awareness into action. Over the past few months, I have had the opportunity to speak to many people who were curious about my project and asked me to explain what I was researching. What surprised me was how consistently people connected with the subject. Almost everyone I spoke to had something to say about it, agreed that they had noticed some form of this change, and became curious about where the project would lead and what its findings might reveal.
This made me realise that people are genuinely curious about what this increasing visual muting might mean. What are the effects of it on us? How does it influence the way we feel, behave or interact with our surroundings? And if we are able to identify and understand these effects more clearly, perhaps we can begin to think about how, and whether we want to respond to them.
At the same time, I have become increasingly aware that the way I describe this project can unintentionally exclude people. The phrase “a colourless world” can suggest that colourlessness is a universal experience, when in reality our relationships with colour are incredibly different. There are many different reasons why someone’s visual environment may already be less colourful, and colour itself is experienced and perceived differently by everyone.
I therefore do not want this project to suggest that a world with less colour is inherently negative, or that people who experience the world differently because of visual impairment, colour vision deficiency or other factors have a worse experience of it. That is not the argument I am trying to make. My interest is much more systematic: I am interested in the psychological implications of changes in the colour and tonal range of the everyday environments we collectively inhabit.
This distinction became particularly important through the conversations I have had during my research. I have not only spoken to people with what might be considered typical colour vision; I have also spoken to visually impaired people and people with colour vision deficiencies. These conversations made me realise that a muted environment can also be experienced differently depending on how someone perceives colour, contrast and tonal variation in the first place.
In that sense, the project is not necessarily about having a particular type of vision. It is about being part of an environment where visual choices are collectively made and experienced. We live in a society, and our environments are shared. The way one person experiences or responds to their surroundings can influence the people around them, just as the choices made by others shape our own environments.
This is also where communication becomes important again. We need to communicate with one another in order to live, work and exist within the systems and communities we share. If the visual environments we create influence how we feel and behave, then they can also influence how we interact with each other.
Ultimately, I am not trying to argue that colour is good and colourlessness is bad. I am trying to understand what happens when the visual environment around us changes, how differently people experience that change, and what these changes might mean for the way we understand ourselves and communicate with one another.
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