Colours & Emotions
An interactive-space, art installation concept

Emotions make us human, just like colours, emotions sometimes are deep or shallow, arresting or liberating, uplifting or gloomy. In our day to day lives, emotions inspire us to actions. This project is an exploration into finding a connection between human emotions and colours.

Following a 1-week expertise module, I started with an exploring journey, creating various colour compositions and understanding the behaviours of different colour types and mediums.

This exercise helped to comprehend materials, colours, media and come up with ideas to render an abstract visualisation of human emotions with colours.

Experiment Design



To understand people's perception of colours to represent emotions, I invited some participants to conduct an art experiment. Post briefing the participants about the project, they were asked to choose any random emotion from their everyday life and following their cultural references from the dataset provided by PANTONE, they were asked, to express them using their face as an art canvas.

Data Set

To comprehend the connection between colours and human emotions, I took the help of a cultural study done by PANTONE investigating the emotional perception of various colours across different cultures around the world.

Prototyping Experience

Post learning from explorations and experimentation, I came up with an idea of doing an interactive installation to portray colours on a contemporary human face, depicting human emotions through a medium of colour on a 3-dimensional media.

The installation would invite individuals and couples to an art exhibition, showcasing the explorations from this project and playing with a sensory installation. Here they can walk-in to a sensory space to explore, what emotion is represented by their favourite colour, following their cultural backgrounds.

Using an Arduino board, ultrasonic sensors and some RGB LEDs, I built a prototype as a proof of concept of this idea on a miniature scale.

Art Installation Plan


Art Gallery Visualisation


Art Gallery Visualisation
Proof of concept prototype: