Ancient cultures often used color as a kind of therapy, prescribing red or yellow or green for various distresses of the body and mind. F. Scott Fitzgerald used legal pads. Scientists have known for decades that certain colors generate specific emotional responses in people. For example, pediatric wards often are painted in a bubble-gum pink, which is known to be comforting to children. It is called so because green was considered to be a color that aided concentration.
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.