Sustainable Color for Tomorrow - Color through knowing, feeling and acting

Color is defined as radiation in the visible light region, and there are numerous ways of producing it. Textile markets use colors and constant changing of them as crucial factors for influencing individuals and enhancing sales. Color can impact attitudes, perceptions and behaviors. It plays an important role in customers’ decisions on what they like and dislike. Colors and their combinations evoke emotions.

It is probable that in the future the concept of color might be different compared to what we think of it today. Lighter shades save raw material, energy and environment, and recycled textile material need no further dyeing when fibers are sorted by color. It is also important to see the value of undyed material in its natural form. Degradability is appreciated, while dyes generally are produced as stable as possible to possess high quality and unchangeability. In the future, and to meet The Sustainable Development Goals, a new attitude towards the properties of color and colorants needs to be learned together with novel meanings for change, aging and fading of color.

In this article we speculate in which ways knowledge, feeling and action guide us toward sustainable color choices, and what future’s color palette could be in the context of sustainability. We apply the structures of attitudes theory, i.e. cognitive (knowing), affective (feeling) and conative (acting), for the description of futures color. Furthermore, we describe this “three-component color space” as a driver for the futures possibilities, probabilities, and desirabilities (preferences) of colors.