Color trend collections
The fashion, automotive, housewares, and building products industries are among the many businesses investing in predictive forecasts to determine what the next global color trends will be. For commercial interior spaces, four main color trends, motivations, and palettes have been identified:
Biophilic awareness
Biophilic awareness emphasizes the relationship with the natural world. Daylight, outside views, indoor plants, water features, natural materials, and naturally inspired colors and finishes are some of the design elements that can help make the indoors feel more like the outdoors. Ceiling designs inspired by biophilic awareness will favor curves and organic shapes, wood and wood-look finishes, and colors reminiscent of plant and ocean life ranging from seaweed and eucalyptus greens to storm and azure blues.
Wabi-sabi
The traditional, Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi appreciates the beauty of imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness. It accepts the transient nature of the physical world and celebrates the authentic character and serenity gained with time. Modern adaptations also apply this concept to human-made objects imbued with understated elegance and visible signs of age, wear, or repair. Asymmetrical and natural forms with smooth edges and surfaces depict wabi-sabi in earth tones of clay, cork, chalk, hemp, stone, or wood and copper finishes. The uncluttered wabi-sabi trend works well as an interior design strategy for places of healing, learning, and meditating. It is ideal for spaces where people are encouraged to take care of themselves and each other, rediscover lost skills, reclaim natural resources, and contemplate their future.
Technology
When the future is uncertain and choices are limited, the technology-inspired trend acknowledges distractions can also be therapeutic. A new digital layer is merging human and artificial intelligence (AI) to define and combine the places where people live, eat, heal, learn, shop, work, and play. The user’s experiences are becoming synonymous with the user’s identity. Metallic, manufactured, and molded materials in sharp angles, crisp edges, and precise radial arches represent this trend in chromatic blue, dark gray, and elemental tones of mercury, zinc, and iron.
Calm enclosure
Despite its name, the calm enclosure trend is not a subdued style. It celebrates spaces and colors empowering people to find their inner peace and giving them the courage to outwardly express themselves. Energizing, playful, and surprising, this palette embraces mustard yellows, deep scarlets, powdered corals, and seashell pinks, matched with rounded, wavy shapes and powdered, velvety textures. The calm enclosure trend is well suited for spaces that promote communication, collaboration, creativity, connection, and compassion.
Color perception, light reflectance, and consistency
The material, lighting, and shape of an object or a space can change the human eye’s perception of color. Isaac Newton’s scientific studies in the 1660s demonstrated color is the reflection and absorption of light; lighter colors reflect more light and darker colors absorb more.
Ceiling designs frequently specify a smooth, white surface with high light reflectance (LR) to maximize the use of natural light, while more efficiently using electric lighting, and diffusing the light for a more comfortable and productive occupant experience. For example, an office with a bright white ceiling panel may be specified with a 0.86 LR, indicating that 86 percent of light will be reflected from its surface.
For spaces where very low LR is preferred, such as in a theater, internet cafe, or electronic gaming center, a dark black ceiling panel may be specified with a 0.04 LR. Every color of ceiling panel has its own LR value.
At Akamai Technologies new global headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, black ceiling panels were placed in the presentation room to enhance audio-visual experience. White ceilings above the open workstations and in the corridors have an 0.85 LR, a Hemp color panel with a 0.45 LR was used for the huddle rooms and private offices, and Stone color ceiling panels with a 0.55 LR were designated to the boardroom.
While it may go unnoticed, the human eye perceives color as changing with the light source and its position, the time of day, and the time of year. Color will look different in the morning than in the afternoon, in the spring than during fall, in a south-facing versus a north-facing room, and inside a room versus on a building’s exterior.
Different materials and shapes also change the way a color appears. Almost everyone has discussed whether a particular ‘off-white’ has more pink, yellow, or green. Depending on whether a surface is made of stone wool, metal, or wood, or whether it is curved, angled or flat, the viewer may perceive the same color as a lighter or darker tone, or even with a different hue.
Before specifying multiple ceiling products in a space, request samples from the manufacturer to examine the finished materials side by side under the same conditions the owner and occupant will see them. This is especially important when considering a mix of materials and manufacturers. Most commonly, designers will want to match the ceiling panels with the suspension systems, acoustic baffles or ceiling clouds, or a decorative accent piece such as a curved metal ceiling feature. A single source supplier will have more control in maintaining color consistency.
Regardless of the ceiling product or material, be aware of which surfaces are visible and are included as part of the standard finish. Ask the questions:
• Are the edges the same color as the surface?
• If the installing contractor makes a cut in the field, will touch-up paint be needed?
• Will a 360-degree finish be applied if the ceiling system
is designed for an open plenum, with various curves and angles, or visible from an upper level?
• If the ceiling is low and within reach, will lighter color panels need to withstand more regular and rigorous cleaning?
• If the ceiling is higher than 3 m (10 ft), how noticeable will the color be to those at floor level?
