Color as a New Skin: Technology and Personalization
Luca Simeone
Chapter Summary. What color is associated with technology and technological objects? Observing the consistent quantity of metalized, pearly white, and satin black products (laptops, mobile phones, domestic appliances), one wonders whether there should be a universally shared grammar for the design of technological objects. It is as if the limitation of color, smooth packaging, and satiny surfaces could highlight how precious and high-performing the technological equipment hidden inside is. This chapter highlights some stories where individuals use layers of color (paint, stickers, decorations) to cover their technological objects, thus inscribing new meaning onto them. This resemantization of objects through colored layers becomes a strategy and an individual and social practice for questioning and contesting orders of reality.
In particular this chapter analyzes the use of color stickers and objects in taxis, mostly their dashboards, as a means of encoding more personalized symbolic worlds, at the crossroads of multiple, dislocated, and radically different social and cultural articulations.
Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower.
All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. (Calvino 1978: 7)
LAYERING STATES OF REALITY
Poststructuralist deconstructive sensibilities consider the world as a perspectival construct that flows continuously across all its indeterminate and polycentric multiplicity; “a world that is diversified, heterogeneous, fragmentary, connectable, disassemblable and overturnable, made of layers” (Gregory 2003: 26). Individuals weave their lives, narratives, memories into this complex, multilayered system, fluctuating between global and local dimensions and moving across intervals of time, space, and culture. Inside and across specific contexts patterns and practices of color usage might represent forms of aesthetic, historical, and political expressions, visual narration, and sensibility. Recent works on color have taken into account approaches from psychophysics, neuropsychology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics in order to identify color usage categories and patterns across different cultures (Hardin and Maffi 1997; Nassau 1998). Meanwhile, other researchers have adopted a more poststructuralist approach highlighting the transmuting dynamics of color semiosis practices. Meaning associated with color and color application is decomposed into a chain of ramifying connotations based on cultural specificity and individual situatedness (Gage 1999; MacLaury, Paramei, and Dedrick 2007). Within this theoretical framework, the interpretation and use of color are seen as variables dependent on the historically situated imaginations of people living within and across specific social, cultural, economic contexts.
This chapter tries to highlight some specific stories in the field of the anthropology of consumption where individuals use layers of color (paint, stickers, decorations) to cover technological objects, thus inscribing new meaning onto them. This resemantization of objects through colored layers becomes a strategy for questioning and contesting orders of reality, an individual and social practice acting at both a conscious and subconscious level. In particular this chapter analyzes the use of color stickers and objects in taxis, mostly their dashboards, as a means of encoding more personalized symbolic worlds, at the crossroads of multiple, dislocated, and radically different social and cultural articulations. As such, it will examine problems and issues that arise in the use of color layering in evolving syncretic and hybridized cultural and social spaces. Three images exemplifying the personalized touch of these syncretic aesthetics can be seen in Plates 46, 47, 48.
TECHNOLOGICAL OBJECTS AND COLOR LAYERING IN CONTACT ZONES
Stephen Eskilson focuses on the relation between product design and the industrial use of color on the 1920s and 1930s environment in the United States (Eskilson 2002). He remarks that from the earliest industrial design periods onward “color played a key role in this shift in the United States’ economy toward the dominance of consumption” (Eskilson 2002: 28). Color is an important element in the shaping of identity and positioning of both products and brands as semiotic engines. As Jean Baudrillard points out: “In order to become an object of consumption, the object must become sign; that is, in some way it must become external to a relation that it now only signifies, a-signed arbitrarily and non-coherently to this concrete relation, yet obtaining its coherence, and consequently its meaning, from an abstract and systematic relation to all other object-signs. It is in this way that it becomes ‘personalized’, and enters in the series, etc.: it is never consumed in its materiality, but in its difference” (Baudrillard 2001: 25). The use of color is a key factor in defining differentiation, value, and marketing strategies of a specific product within the reactive, complex, and animated landscape of consumption.
Although much information is unpublished because of competitive concerns, several studies from various fields have investigated the relationships between the use of color and marketing strategies, positioning, and practices, and in particular how color influences the perception and interpretation of products and subsequently increases their appeal (e.g., Trent 1993; Grossman and Wisenblit 1999; Crowley 1993; Bellizzi, Crowley, and Hasty 1983). Marketing experts on color draw on scientific literature where several dimensions of color are explored ranging from color as a primary physical phenomenon to theories that see it “as a more subjective phenomenon making it the product of our sensory apparatus and/or of the processing and interpretation that takes place in the brain” (Garber and Hyatt 2003: 315). Within this set of theories color is considered a (partially) cultural artifact that holds personal meanings for an individual. Learned contexts and culturally and historically based visions of the world mediate and at times dominate neurophysiological color response (Scott 1994; Garber, Hyatt, and Starr 2000). Other studies specifically deal with cultural contextual influences on product choices and the degree of consistency for color preferences among different cultural universes (Funk and Ndubisi 2004; Ndubisi and Funk 2004; Funk and Ndubisi 2006; Crozier 1999).
Some of the studies mentioned above additionally focus on marketing strategies, positioning, and practice for technological products. What color is associated with technology and technological objects? Observing the consistent quantity of metalized, pearly white, and satin black products (laptops, mobile phones, domestic appliances), one wonders whether there should be a universally shared grammar for the design of technological objects. It is as if the limitation of color, smooth packaging, and satiny surfaces could highlight how precious and high-performing the technological equipment hidden inside is in a more representative way. Shades of silver, pearl, metalized gray have been among the most popular automotive color trends in the last twenty years in Western markets (North America and Europe). In a 1996 interview about future color trends in the auto industry, Bob Daily, DuPont Automotive Finishes color styling and marketing manager, stated: “We see the high-tech trend influencing silver and gold with metallic and pearlescent effects, as well as pigment technology that creates hue shifts based on different viewing angles” (Triplett 1996: 21). The 2011 DuPont Global Automotive Color Popularity Report still states that silver, black, white, and gray are the top colors in the first-ever ranking of worldwide vehicle color popularity.1
Technological objects are often seen as machines of wonder that promise such a variety of experiences that maybe they cannot be represented if not with neutral colors, on which each of us is free to project his or her desires, enthusiasm, and hopes.
This fleet of technological products is often designed in the workshops of compa-nies in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, South Korea—in a limited number of countries—and then distributed pervasively throughout the world. Yet, the aesthetic of this uniform milky grayness (and how much it conceals behind it) is not appreciated everywhere. The result is that sometimes new aesthetics, syncretic and triumphant with colors, cover these neutrally designed objects equipping them with new multicolored skins. A cross-cultural example of these transformations can be traced observing the visual styling of taxis (and other vehicles) across several countries from the United States to India, Thailand, Mexico, Bolivia, the Philippines: decorative frames and layers, with their sweeps of color, reappropriate representational forms, resemantizing automobiles, vehicles, trucks and linking them to local, private histories, to more familiar aesthetic and narrative dimensions. As the interaction designer Ranjit Makkuni points out in a recent interview: “Taxi drivers in Mumbai ornament their taxis (a technology) so that the migrant driver (who is far way from home) can remember his village and values while on the move. Hence part of the solution today may be the recapture of ornament and the creation of personalized meaning in an environment of depersonalization” (Simeone 2009: 60).
Color usage and layering through stickers, spray painting, and applying sticky objects is a common practice to inscribe personal meaning onto these objects, thus transforming their physical bodies and spaces into sites of cultural identity. These practices of cultural reappropriation happen particularly frequently in those areas labeled as “contact zones.” Contact zones is a term derived from Mary Louise Pratt’s work: “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991: 34). The streets of Manila, bus stations in Bangkok, the decorated dashboard of a taxi driven by a Sikh and crossing the avenues of New York are all contemporary contact zones where technology encounters a specific subset of users. As James Clifford argues, contact zone theories are perspectival constructs that: “do not see ‘culture contact’ as one form progressively, sometimes violently, replacing another. They focus on relational ensembles sustained through processes of cultural borrowing, appropriation, and translation—multidirectional processes. And if the productions of modernity are exchanges, in this perspective, they are never free exchanges: the work of transculturation is aligned by structural relations of dominance and resistance, by colonial, national, class, and racial hierarchies” (Clifford 2003: 34).
New grammars and languages emerge inside contact zones; color layering functions as a discursive strategy to inscribe individual identity and meaning within contexts of evolving, transmigrant interpretation. Ranjit Makkuni is the Indian interaction designer who currently runs the Sacred World Foundation, a laboratory in New Delhi that develops experimental digital media based on natural interactions, augmented reality, and wearable computers. Makkuni started his professional career in the Xerox laboratories of Palo Alto, developing programming languages and the first GUIs (Graphic User Interface). The Xerox studies on GUI were then taken on by large computer companies such as Microsoft and Apple, to develop the near totality of the operative systems and software that is spread in millions of copies around the planet. However, at a certain point in his professional pathway, Makkuni effected a radical development: he considered the limitations of the applications that were produced by American companies principally for an American market and then sold in many countries to many people with extremely different cultures, habits, and needs. This is how Makkuni describes the crux of his observation: “In rural communities, villagers may be illiterate with respect to Silicon Valley’s notions of GUI, i.e., button pushing, point and click, but highly sophisticated with respect to hand skills and tactile interfaces. What is the equivalent of GUI in village contexts? What narratives are found in the village in the traditional performing arts of puppetry, theatre, mask dance? How do these narrative forms reflect a traditional society’s perception of time and space? How might these inform the design of non-Windows based GUI?” (Forero and Simeone 2010).
Following this line of thought, Ranjit Makkuni has developed a syncretic aesthetics where interaction design devices get wrapped and decorated with Indian multicolored traditional artwork and patterns, as in the installations exhibited in the recent Crossing Project and Planet Health Museum in Delhi. Ranjit Makkuni pioneers the personalization of what he considers “impersonal” technological devices through the inclusion of world motifs, patterns, and crafts in the products, thus restoring colors.
TAXI DASHBOARDS FROM CALCUTTA TO DURBAN
Colors for exterior and interior surfaces of taxis are often decided in collaboration with international and local authorities, and they are usually consistent within specific geographic areas. Uniform fleets of yellow, green, black cabs cross the streets of Rome, Mexico City, London so that customers can immediately recognize official taxi services. Dashboard colors are even more highly standardized. While the exterior design is the realm of automotive stylists and car designers, dashboard design is often a collaborative and co-design process where ergonomic and functional dimensions are crucial. Multidisciplinary teams with people coming from different backgrounds (ergonomics, human factors, cognitive psychology, interaction design, marketing, operation) work together to define the best driving experience. Within this domain, every element of the dashboard is highly significant and carefully defined so as to create a driving interface that is easy to use, efficient, and effective (Norman 2004; Brown 2009). The design of a dashboard therefore requires significant investments across the entire production line. This is the main reason why car dashboards, once designed, tend to be consistent across times, markets, and cultures. Typical taxi dashboard colors are black, gray, beige, silver: a neutral, highly functional grayness that immediately highlights commands and driving information.
It is not surprising then that this neutral grayness becomes a writing board ready to be personalized by taxi drivers who spend most of their daily life inside their cab. Taxi dashboards function as sites of inscription, where multicolored stickers and window decals, bottles of perfumes and oils, incense sticks, holiday cards, religiously inscribed bookmarks, wall plaques ornament this neutral technological environment.
As Joann D’Alisera notices during her ethnographic observation of Muslim Sierra Leoneans’ taxi cabs in Washington, DC: “From the outside, his weathered black and white sedan appears to be a typical Washington, DC taxi. The inside is another story. Like many taxis driven by Muslim Sierra Leoneans, Mustafa’s is inscribed with his personal vision of Islam. The dashboard is covered with stickers, Qur’anic verses in Arabic. An embroidered box that contains a copy of the Holy Qur’an sits on top. Multiple copies of various pamphlets that Mustafa gets free from the Islamic Center, and cassette tapes, all of which are Qur’anic recitation (D’Alisera 2001: 91–92) are strewn on the front seat. And again, “As a site that is both private (his) and public (passengers’), his taxi becomes a vehicle in which multiple social codes interact, at times in conflict” (D’Alisera 2001: 93). Mustafa’s cab is a public site on which he encodes his vision of the world, a site in which Islam is negotiated according to their owners’ own subject positions.
Swati Chattopadhyay studies the ways in which the interior and the exterior surfaces of vehicles get covered by color layers representing slogans, icons, religious symbols, thus creating an informal, molecular art, in perennial movement. This vehicular art “constitutes one way by which the marginalized populations of the city have created their own space in the city—physically, economically, culturally. The spatial logic of marginality in Calcutta in the second half of the 20th century was a product of a series of compromises between city authorities, the poor, and the middle classes, between the elite and the subaltern, between the formal and informal economy” (Chattopadhyay 2009: 136). Chattopadhyay specifically focuses on the unbalanced power relationships within postcolonial contexts and sees these new colorful skins as a grammar for a subaltern insurgency in India, in the terms clearly represented by Ranajit Guha: “a massive and systematic violation of the words, gestures and symbols which has the relations of power in colonial society as their significata” (Chattopadhyay 2009: 132). And Chattopadhyay follows by asking: “Could we translate this relation between the subaltern and the popular to everyday life by seeing the crisis not as sudden spectacular rupture but as woven into daily transactions as small disjointed events?” (Chattopadhyay 2009: 133). For taxi drivers in Calcutta, fuchsia, bright yellow, fluorescent green stickers are some structural elements of this subaltern grammar.
Stephen R. Inglis studies the effect of printing technologies in the act of personalizing several objects such as taxi dashboards: “Most Indian paintings originally were an integral part of the building for which they were designed. […] Printing technology and rapid reproduction have tended to reverse this situation, in that the painting travels to the viewer rather than the viewer to the painting” (Phillips and Steiner 1999: 132). Advancements in printing and molding technologies allow the production and distribution of inexpensive objects that can be used as color layers: stickers, decals, cards, a fleet of affordable, easy-to-use objects, ready to create temporary sites of inscription across vast geographic areas (from the colectivos in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico to the tuk-tuk in Thailand).
In a recent ethnographic account, Thomas Blom Hansen studies taxi decorations in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township south of Durban, South Africa (Hansen 2006). Indian taxi drivers experience the new condition of the post-apartheid in Durban that emerges “as a new, immensely creative African metropolis…a properly urban space, marked by unpredictability, difference, and the incessant movement of anonymous bodies and signs” (Hansen 2006: 186). Hansen analyzes the way taxi drivers ornament their cabs trying to redefine and express their identity within this new complex array of intersecting circumstances: “The swanking taxis and their decorations are distinctly Indian interpretations of the world of taxis. For taxis in the African townships, style is marked by the style of drivers and conductors and the style of music rather than by visual decoration. The style of decoration and equipment in the Indian townships reflect the wider obsession with cars—the single most important staple of everyday male conversation—and the technical competence that abounds in Chatsworth” (Hansen 2006: 198). And again: “In a bid to attract the burgeoning market of style-conscious teenagers in Chatsworth—keen consumers of white, Afro-American, and the globally circulating South Asian forms of fashion and music—taxis began to compete on style and sound. By the late 1990s the so-called swanking taxis, or swankers, appeared—painted in bright colors and sporting striking and dramatic motifs, seats in matching colors, and huge sound systems. The motifs range from dragons and huge weapons to half-naked blondes in leather outfits. The names range from Bad Boyz, Bone Crusher, or Spiderman, to distinctly unsubtle ones such as Ladykiller and Big Willie. Other taxis take their names from the local soccer heroes, the Manning Rangers (also known as the Mighty Maulers), and some taxis flaunt the Muslim identity of their owners with green colors and inscriptions such as ‘Allah-hu-Akbar [Allah is great]’ ” (Hansen 2006: 197). The paint and colors help Indian taxi drivers renegotiate their identity in the evolving, transmigrant, fragmented context of post-apartheid. “The style of decoration on taxis also reflects an ironic play on stereotypes about Indians—the loud and colorful style, the over-the-top quality of the Bollywood style and aesthetic. When discussing this apparent Indian predilection for colors, the taxi drivers, owners, and ordinary customers always provided ironic and mocking explanations: ‘We Indians love colors, don’t you know?’; ‘Ah, it is like Bollywood!’; ‘When you witous (whites) think it is too much, that is when the charous love it!’ Others would ironically repeat the slogan of Radio Lotus, the biggest Indian radio station in the country: ‘Not Everything Is Black or White!’ ” (Hansen 2006: 199).
In Durban’s post-apartheid multiple dislocations and differences, color stickers are a way for Indian taxi drivers to elaborate and narrate their positioning in society. In another study, Olatunde Bayo Lawuyi analyzes the world of Yoruba taxi drivers, focusing on vehicle slogans as expressions of social stratification among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria (Lawuyi 1988). He notes that: “An intricated set of colored stickers act as a wrapper of new meaning for the taxis, both the interior and exterior, a layer where slogans such as ‘Tie da?’ (‘Where is yours?’) signify that the vehicle owners have special powers which, however unroad-worthy their vehicles are, make them better off than those without or ‘Aiye e ma binu wa’ (‘World, don’t be angry with us’) that is a pray for a good destiny (ori). A really complex grammar of colorful stickers accompany drivers in their daily life struggle and sets on stage the Yoruba vision of the world and Yoruba divine symbols, the juju, to evoke beliefs, sentiments and emotions for security and success” (Lawuyi 1988: 5–9).
Through the use of these temporary layering tools taxi drivers transform a physical space into a site of cultural negotiation. Colored dashboards work as an active semiotic engine where relevant cultural traditions can be preserved and utilized and as an emerging aesthetics that merges “multiple interacting codes drawn from national and regional identity, tourism, political ideology, language, cultural background, and immigrant status” (Cadaval 1991: 206–7).
CONCLUSION
Diomira, the metalized city narrated by Italo Calvino, all encrusted with layers of gold, silver, bronze, lead beams particularly splendidly when multicolored lamps are lighted up. Multicolored reflections are a symbol of a previous (forgotten?) happiness. In a recent book Thomas Friedman argues: “Because it is flattening and shrinking the world, Globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse—non-Western, non-white—group of individuals. Individuals from every corner of the flat world are being empowered. Globalization 3.0 makes it possible for so many more people to plug and play, and you are going to see every colour of the human rainbow take part” (Friedman 2005: 10). Friedman’s optimistic vision of globalization only partially takes into account the existing unbalanced relations of economic, political, and military power and dominance. As Kathleen Connellan remarks: “Post-apartheid society and the fêted rainbow nation have been generally romanticized as a colorful ideal of multi-lingual ethnicities making efforts to share cultures and bury hatchets. But that is an exterior, trendy street view and constitutes a quintessential postmodernism, one that is vibrant and edgy” (Connellan 2010: 60). At times and in specific contexts, groups of individuals must actively fight to express their share of the human rainbow.
Multicolored stickers, window decals, cards serve as some sort of creative weapon for semiotic drifts and cultural reappropriations. Color layering practices in taxi dashboards and over other technological objects constitute a structural element of hybrid grammars and discourses, an element deeply immersed into the historical and political processes of sustaining, making, and remaking cultural bodies in contemporary contact zones. Bright colors layered on top of the metalized, pearly white, and satin black surfaces of technological objects work as crystallized secretions of the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of individuals living (and fighting) in contact zones. We hope that all sorts of multicolored skins will keep lighting up as signs of more polyphonic visions, as a testimony to new actors establishing their own discursive identity.
1. 2011 DuPont Global Automotive Color Popularity Report Insights, http://www2.dupont.com/automotive/en-us/au/article/color-popularity.html (accessed June 22, 2012).
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