An Asian student in my laboratory was working on an application to visualize changes in computer software. She chose to represent deleted entities with the color green and new entities with red. I suggested to her that red is normally used for a warning, while green symbolizes renewal, so perhaps the reverse coding would be more appropriate. She protested, explaining that green symbolizes death in China, while red symbolizes luck and good fortune. The use of color codes to indicate meaning is highly culture-specific.
—Information Visualization, Second Edition: Perception for Design, page 16 (via Keith Lang)
I hypothesize that color-codings derived from nature and physics (for example more and less mapping to hotter and colder colors) would work across cultural divides. But maybe that’s just the science-worshiping American in me talking.
UPDATED 2009-02-02: There’s some very good commentary on this post. My hypothesis was wrong, or at very least missed the real difficulty of color coding. Also, it now appears the anecdote was not real culture shock, but a smart student defending their design with the first thing they could think of when it was suddenly challenged.
Science says blue is hot, red is cold. Day-to-day happenings have convinced humans otherwise. What do you mean by hotter and colder colors? Artists and colorimetrists do not speak the same language.
Comment by Jason Petersen — January 30, 2009 @ 6:04 am
Unless I’ve misunderstood your point, surely the quote you give directly disproves your hypothesis? The red for danger, green for renewal comes directly from nature where green is a sign of life and red is a signifier of danger (cf aposematic colouration).
Actually, this Asian student gets around. I’ve seen the quote elsewhere and I’ve failed to find any other evidence on the internet that green symbolizes death in China (in fact, the opposite). I suspect that the student was making a quick excuse for her error in choosing colours! I’m not saying that colours are not culture-specific, just that this is not necessarily an example.
Comment by Hilary Wilson — January 30, 2009 @ 11:26 am
On reflection the real moral may be that you need a key to map color to most things. Stuff we’ve seen before gives us an implicit key. But unless you know your users will have seen the same colors used to represent the same things, you need to have an explicit key.
@Jason,
Actually, in summer-school I got in trouble during art class for using blue as my “hot” color. Yes, it is hotter! I had completely forgotten that incident. the color-temperature scale is reversed, in that the bigger number means cooler:
What a confusing mess!
@ Hilary Wilson,
Thanks for that skepticism. All the pictures I’ve seen show red/stop green/go streetlights being used in China. So red/caution, green/new seems like an appropriate mapping for Chinese users.
I’m not sure about the red-means-danger mapping to be honest. What is “natural” to people today? Strawberries are deliciously red. So are twizzelers, and tomatoe sauce on pizza. Most people who use computers probably never learned that red food means dangerous. They just learned “don’t eat plants you didn’t grow yourself, or got from the grocery”. And even in the wild, not everything red is bad.
Comment by Vincent Gable — February 1, 2009 @ 11:39 pm