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What is Qualia?

After graduating with a minor in psychology, I didn’t exactly learn the brain inside and out. However, I developed certain curiosities and am always looking for ways to tie psychology into design. In fact, I feel that design hinges on the principles of psychology. After all, is design not packaging visual ideas in relation to what we know about human perception? We make design decisions because we believe it will influence readability, usability, aesthetic appeal, or emotional impact (and I’m sure there are other reasons). We use relationships in things like size, position, color, and form to accomplish this. All of these correlate with psychological concepts, which are very powerful things to leverage in design.

The most fascinating and controversial subject in the field of psychology is consciousness. Some psychologists argue that little progress has been made, that we have done nothing that truly helps us further understand what consciousness really is. We’ve found the physical correlates of consciousness, but that doesn’t exactly explain how the subjective experience is created. Because it can’t be explained purely in terms of physical brain hardware like neurons and such, philosophy has taken up a large role in the discussion of consciousness. In reading the blog Conscious Entities, where some of the top minds in the field contribute articles and comments, I came across some very interesting concepts. One is called qualia. Qualia is the experience of things, or the “way things seem”. The prototypical example is the color red. We can describe it in terms of a light’s wavelength, but we can’t truly describe the way it looks. How do you know that what you see as red is perceived the same way as another person? There is no “right” way to perceive a color. In other words, our conscious experience does not directly reflect reality, but rather a filtered representation of it.

I’ve given a very simplistic overview of qualia compared to what’s been discussed by the greatest psychologists and philosophers. If you think about it hard enough, it’ll begin to sink in how crazy of a concept it is. Just imagine, we can all be perceiving colors and such in a completely different way than each other, but calling them the same things, and there’s no way we can ever know.

Image credit: Conscious Entities (http://www.consciousentities.com)

Poor Pink and Purple

As I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was pondering the fact that female designers have a little bit of a leg up on male designers: they can use pink and purple. Woah, wait a sec…I can’t use pink or purple in my color palette? Who says? The fact that I so mindlessly and casually attributed pink and purple almost exclusively to female designers makes for an interesting point: what stops most male designers from considering these colors?

In American culture, pink represents female and blue represents male. The notion of color coding male and female is embedded from the get-go. Toys and clothes, for example, almost always follow the pink and blue dichotomy. Since males are inherently concerned about their masculinity, we learn to avoid the color, both consciously and unconsciously. Amongst peers at an early age, I remember there was a social stigma attached to the color pink. Even in my 5th grade class, I remember the other kids already associating pink with homosexuality. Purple was treated similarly, mostly because it creeps away from blue, towards pink, in the color spectrum.

It’s embedded into the male psyche. When I’m checking out shirts at the store, I make sure to avoid pink and purple. When I consider possible color palettes, I avoid pink and purple, except for maybe one occasion. Really, this is ridiculous. I’m a designer, and yet I have a bias towards certain colors, because let’s face it: I have been conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs to avoid them, as an unconscious measure to avoid being considered homosexual, or at least not manly. It’s laughable when put into words.

To put it into complete perspective, pink and purple are like any other color; they are our brain’s representations of certain wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Photo taken by jennybubbletime on Flickr.