Color is important in expressing emotions and creating a sensory experience. We thoughtfully selected a balanced and harmonious palette for the healthcare market and beyond, considering factors such as performance, texture, and price, to meet various needs. The focus is on creating a seamless and limitless design journey for designers, allowing them to effortlessly connect materials and explore a wide range of choices.
TRANSCRIPT
One of the things that I love most about color is its humanity, that it has the capacity to express how people are feeling. And that actually drives or supports what they’re trying to do within a space. While our world may seem visual, it is actually quite sensorial and color in and of itself is a sensory experience, and that affects all of the senses. And we do think about that a lot. The words that drove Plural, you know, the types of ways that they wanted to serve community, for me, was this lightbulb about how we manifest that on a surface. How do we manifest that in a group of choices? And how do we think about it in the most holistic way, it allows us to really co create from a point of strength and clarity? And I feel that it drove our decision making process as we were moving through the palette.
I think that the palette is very reflective of who they are as people and you can see that in our selection and the materiality. There’s a soothing quality, about even the colors that we chose. We believe that the palette is balanced and in harmony and I believe that that was really a big thing that is necessary in the world as we move forward. Particularly in the health care market, we were really able to work backwards on a holistic palette that allowed people to choose with intention to support those needs. We broke them down into the emotions that people wanted to feel, the markets, and the types of solutions that they might need. Some might need performance more than others, some might need comforting texture in situations more than others. It allowed us to fulfill all of those needs and to understand what we were looking for with a deeper clarity. That’s really important because we are always trying to serve the designer core trying to make all these connections and to help them to create something effortlessly and with joy.
When we chose these textiles and we were grading them in, it wasn’t that we weren’t aware of price, because we want it to be respectful of price as a choice. But it was driven by many different things about the way it might feel to touch it, the types of color breath that it might offer, the kind of performance needs that it may have. And then how could those things be integrated across multiple manufacturers. So we were looking for many different things in terms of it being in relationship and that’s often challenging, because it’s not a singular manufacturer. We have many manufacturers and their visions coming together to create this palette.
What we thought about is point of entry, and by that I mean where might a designer start? They don’t always start in the same place. And my understanding that the point of entry would have to lead to other connections. If you started with a metal and had to move to a wood, what would that experience be like? How do we balance warm and cool? How do we balance smoother surfaces and the metallics versus the quality of the luster that we wanted? How would those be perceived on legs? How would we move to wood? And how can we lower the gloss level so that you actually felt you were connecting with wood and not a shiny surface. When you brought in the textiles that was one more layer. So we were really thinking about the experience of moving from one material to the next and that it would lead you on a journey; you would never ever reach a dead end. And that was really important because as designers, that’s time, and that’s mind space, and that’s creativity, and we wanted them to feel like this was never ending; the choices were never ending.