Nothing is more elemental than color. The eye is made for color and searches for brightness every time it drifts toward the window, catching the wing of an oriole. We hunger for it in our food, gravitating easily toward the red and yellow peppers, gaudy tomatoes. It is difficult not to make an argument for color and how we obviously thrive within it. And yet nowhere is color more absent or more cautious than in the workplace, where most people spend the greater portion of their waking hours and where we most need our mental and creative energies.
Manufacturers produce furniture in a shade of putty, and companies bought it because it was there.
Then manufacturers continued producing more shades of putty because, after all, that was what people were buying. Somewhere along the line, without really measuring the options or drawing upon the wealth of color research available, companies began to assume that these colors were safe and without risk. Today, however, we live in a time of healthy questioning. Our approach to color also reflects an idea about work in which the hierarchies are firmly laid out, the order of advancement is clear, and security certain. A sort of Dickensian idea in which, although expressiveness is curbed, the company takes care of the worker for life and the worker is loyal.