How has the colour of items changed?

Telephones, televisions, dolls, cameras, CDs, watches, cigarette packets, and tobacco boxes: more than anything, after the Industrial Revolution, our life as human beings and consumers began to fill up with a considerable number of items, in our homes, offices and the public spaces we used. Over time, these items have changed, often becoming more practical, more hard-wearing and cheaper; sometimes they have fallen into disuse and been replaced by other items, with different functions but also with a different look, shape and colour. Using the archive of the Science Museum Group Collection (five science, technology and transport museums spread across England, from Manchester to York) Cath Sleeman, a researcher at Nesta, has tried to examine the evolution of twenty-one categories of items, choosing the most commonly used ones to study how their shape and colour has altered.
Sleeman chose 7,083 photographs out of 380,000 exhibits in the museum’s archive, from the nineteenth century to the current day, and she discovered that the items around us are a lot less colourful. Using the photos, selected by adhering to precise criteria which allowed the colours of the items to be accurately isolated (for example, a background with an even colour), the research focused on shape, colour and texture.

So, it was possible to see the chromatic evolution of design: at first glance, it is clear how the coloured pixel percentage of the photos of the items analysed, from the nineteenth century to the current day, has reduced considerably.

Let’s look at a telegraph from 1844 and an iPhone from 2008: there is a clear, progressive chromatic decline, despite the efforts by Apple to colour their smartphones.

The most commonly used colour in the items examined by Sleeman was, in fact, anthracite grey. And if we consider just how many of our technological devices are often this colour, we shouldn’t be surprised by this information. Naturally, there is the issue of materials - wood, for example, is almost never used any more to build equipment like televisions or wall-mounted telephones. But it is also a matter of taste. If we think of kitchens in the Seventies or lounges in the Sixties, yellow, green and brownish wallpaper which, when seen in a film, immediately create a retro atmosphere and take us back fifty years, we see how the modern-day design focuses more on a harmony of darker shades. So grey increasingly becomes a key player. Our homes and our desks are increasingly less colourful. Sleeman’s analysis, for example, showed a decline in the use of yellow and brown.

If we concentrate on phones, we can observe a peculiar feature: the very first telephones at the end of the nineteenth century share a predominance of black and silver with our smartphones. The most colourful phones are those from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties: their “greying” started at the end of the Eighties.

The interpretation of this research is also a way of travelling through the history of the design of everyday items. Examining the items, as Sleeman has done, allows us to see how much design has changed, even in such a short period of time, following the most varied tastes and looks. It is no coincidence, that when the design appears to favour colours like grey and black, even in films and TV series, they are gravitating towards ever darker shades, as we explain in this article.