For years, I’ve grumbled about this site’s color scheme. The founder has answered my numerous queries on the general orange-ness of the place patiently and simply. He thought it stood out and, hey, he likes orange.
It turns out Mr. Moulitsas may have been a visionary whose website could be the key not only to a more progressive future but a good night’s sleep.
Anthropologist Amber Case is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a visiting researcher at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Her studies of human-computer interface have made her one of the foremost experts in user-experience design. Her TED talk, We are All Cyborgs Now, is a brief manifesto of her concept of “Cyborg Anthropology.”
In her most recent article for Fast Company, Case argues that the tech world’s obsession with bright blue, a design choice based on a few cool science fiction films, is robbing us all of our rest and making us crazy.
The bright blue light of flat, rectangular touch screens, fans, and displays may be appealing from an aesthetic perspective (more on that below), but from a health standpoint, it is fraught with problems. Blue light inhibits the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our sleep cycles. Blue light before bedtime can wreak havoc on our ability to fall asleep. Harvard researchers and their colleagues conducted an experiment comparing the effects of 6.5 hours of exposure to blue light, versus exposure to green light of comparable brightness. They found that blue light suppressed melatonin for about twice as long as the green light and shifted circadian rhythms by twice as much (3 hours compared with 1.5 hours). And worse, it’s been linked in recent studies to an increased risk of obesity and some cancers.
A decade after my experience with the LED fans, I started seeing blue displays everywhere. From mobile phones to in-car displays, blue lights were becoming the norm. It’s hard for me to think of any examples of prominent high-tech products on the market now without pale blue screens or indicator lights. LED-based bulbs with more blue light are fast replacing incandescent bulbs. The default display to our iPhones and Androids operates along the blue spectrum, as do our laptops; new cars, especially those like Tesla which aspire to be “futuristic,” come with blue-lit dashboard displays, and so do our “smart” appliances, televisions, video game consoles, watches–the list goes on.
Thanks to the rapid growth of connected devices and digitized appliances, blue light is now flooding into our lives in places where we’re most vulnerable. It’s why, for instance, when we stumble into the kitchen late at night for some water, we’re guided by the illumination from the touchscreen on our refrigerator–and the after-image of the screen leaves us half-blind, and once back in bed, half-awake
She also points out that interfaces designed by the military for high information density and fast reading—cockpits, bridges, command and control centers—rely on a red-to-orange color scheme, colors that have a lower visual impact and less persistent after-imaging.
Case argues that, to reduce the stress of human-tech interaction, designers for devices, apps and websites shift from “cool” blue to more human-friendly orange.
All this time I’ve been grousing about the, ah, tone of this place and it turns out Markos was years ahead of his time. Orange is the new blue.
Now, if only there was something to be done about the rhyming issue.