Models of colour semiotics

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between colour and certain bi-­‐polar characteristics. This topic has previously been studied through highly controlled laboratory-based experiments but this thesis starts from the question of whether experiments conducted in the laboratory (which are necessarily constrained to have low numbers of participants) can ever hope to capture the full complexity of the relationships being studied, since there are likely to be strong cultural and regional differences. The key advance in this work therefore was to explore the use of a web-­based experiment for collecting data on a large scale and from all over the world. A laboratory-­‐based experiment to explore colour semiotics was carried out and broadly supports the earlier work carried out by Ou et al. A novel paradigm for carrying out colour semiotic experiments based on a large-­scale internet presentation and distributed over large numbers of participants (over 2000 from 58 countries) was then conceived and implemented. Comparison with the laboratory-­based experiment broadly validated the use of this new paradigm. The large amount of data collected allowed an analysis of gender and cultural differences to be carried out and it was shown that cultural and age may be significant factors but that gender is probably not. The thesis has made a contribution in terms of collecting new data, generating new models, and testing a web-­based paradigm for carrying out colour-­‐based experiments. One application of the colour-­‐semiotic models that has been developed at the end of this thesis is in the design process and a potential new software tool that could build a bridge between science and design has been considered.