A few weeks ago, I got nerdsniped by a Beth Mathews essay, Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green. It introduced me to the story of Faber Birren, responsible for the characteristic color schemes we associate with mid-century industrial interiors. More generally, Birren pioneered the use of color as a design and control variable shaping everything from consumer buying behaviors to emergency response behaviors.
Color is especially interesting as an element of Protocol Experience (PX) design, since humans are especially sensitive to color. And color, especially in the form of paint, is a cheap design variable, ideal for persistent, configurational uses. You don’t need electricity to generate a default color scheme. Ambient broad-spectrum illumination (natural or artificial) is enough. And when you do use powered color for dynamic signaling, it is still robust and inexpensive to generate, especially today, with the rise of low-power LED lighting and screens.
Color and Control
Reading Mathews’ article, as a sometime practicing control engineer, I was struck by the realization that though I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about command and control architectures, systems, and protocols, including control rooms, I’ve never thought about color as a particularly important consideration in control engineering, either in theory, or practice.
I’d never noticed that mid-century control rooms have a characteristic sea-foam green color.
When I’ve designed things like dashboards, color has been an afterthought, and I’ve usually done something lazy like code “significant” as “red.”
Yet, color is obviously one of the most powerful design elements available to control system engineers and protocol architects, especially when it comes to human-in-the-loop environments. But engineers don’t study it. Textbooks don’t teach color science. Even history books like David Mindell’s excellent Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing, don’t cover the role of color in command and control.
One reason of course is that color is not easy to use in automated feedback loops, and other kinds of signals are much easier to work with. Detecting and reacting to color-coded signals typically takes cameras attached to significant computing power. In control design, it is much easier to work with electrical or mechanical signals from more specialized sensors.
But when there are humans in the loop, color is a natural and cheap signaling variable. It still doesn’t play a big role though.
The reason is that the human-centeredness of color leads to its neglect in control engineering. Humans, unlike op-amps or microcontrollers, are flaky, temperamental, and unreliable engineering components. Components of last resort when architecting for reliability.
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