APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO

MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB

Ana Luiza Dias

, Junia C. Anacleto

, Luciana M. Silveira

, Rosângela Ap. D. Penteado

and Laís A. S. Meuchi

Departamento de Computação – Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR), São Carlos-SP, Brazil

Departmento de Tecnologia – Universidade Tecnológia do Paraná (UTFPR), Curitiba-PR, Brazil

Keywords: Collaborative work, Web project, Colors, Emotions, Common sense, Motivational patterns.

Abstract: Collaborative and Participatory work via Web tends to increase due to teams of professionals’ needs in

accomplishing tasks separated by distance and time, which demands more effort and stronger commitment

from each person. In this context, it must be considered cultural differences, which interfere with the

performance of each individual and either promote or deny the communication intended for the group. This

paper aims to discuss a multidisciplinary analysis about colors and stimuli in computing environment using

Common Sense knowledge, considering the cultural association people make between colors and actions,

emotions and objects, showing how it can motivate users to access and participate in collaborative tasks

through stimuli using color symbolically built in the culture.

1 INTRODUCTION

With globalization and the need for fast

communication without fixed places and time, the

use of the Internet and Web tends to become more

and more usual, creating the easiness of exchange

information and users` collaboration via Web. New

technologies have changed the ways in which people

interact and collaborate in a distance. The users can

be connected to the net and practice new ways of

collaborative work (Schümmer et al., 2007).

As a result of such situation, the tendency is that

more and more Web applications are designed to be

used by more than one user in a collaborative way.

The developers of collaborative work applications

via Web should try to understand what motivates the

users to engage and as well as to create a virtual

environment that it makes possible the individual

satisfaction to work with their applications in a

productive way.

For such satisfaction, one of the main subjects

chosen in this research is the application of colors in

the Web project, essential for visual communication,

that can reinforce or not the communicative

intention. Colors can help the developers to

highlight important points, as well as facilitate the

content reading and increase the satisfaction and the

user's engagement. It is important to study and to

understand which are the values aggregated to the

colors, once those values can be interpreted, and so

that can vary from culture to culture.

The promotion of universal access to

information comes from respect to culture,

facilitating through the colors and their meanings the

access to information and knowledge contextualized.

This article offers a multidisciplinary analysis about

colors symbolically constructed in culture to the

development of Web applications that encourage

collaborative work participatory. The significance of

color is an issue that will be explored here

considering the cultural context, represented by

knowledge of people’s common sense and what they

associate with each color, with respect to stimuli,

emotions and actions. This work considered people

with normal vision, i.e. people that see the colors.

The common sense knowledge to be used in this

work comes from the Project Open Mind Common

Sense Brazil (OMCS-Br) knowledge base

(www.sensocomum.ufscar.br).

This paper is organized as follow: section 2

points Systems that support computer-mediated-

human interaction; section 3 shows Motivation for

the engagement in activities; section 4 presents

Common sense knowledge to represent culture; the

Luiza Dias A., C. Anacleto J., M. Silveira L., Ap. D. Penteado R. and A. S. Meuchi L. (2009).

APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB.

In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Human-Computer Interaction, pages 27-33

DOI: 10.5220/0001862600270033

 SciTePress

section 5 shows Colors classification; section 6

presents Colors and Emotions; section 7 shows

Classification of Emotion, objects and actions

according to the colors of common sense; section 8

brings some conclusions and future works.

2 SYSTEMS THAT SUPPORT

COMPUTER-MEDIATED-

HUMAN INTERACTION

There are three aspects that should be considered in

the project of applications that support human-

computer-human interaction (HCHI): (I) the core of

the definition is the group, where the computing

applications have the purpose of creating a solution

that satisfies the users' needs; (II) the interaction of

the group; (III) the process of the interaction should

be supported by the application, being like this, the

application should play an encouraging part to

stimulate the interaction among the people, even at

the distance. These are the objectives considered in

this work which aims to achieve with the colors

multidisciplinary analysis based on common sense

knowledge, the promotion of information

comprehension considering cultural aspects,

facilitating, through the colors and their meanings,

the collaborative work.

Huatong Sun (2001) quotes examples to

demonstrate the importance of cultural aspects in

interaction projects, such as: interface elements (the

Brazilian users like vibrant colors and pages with

many figures, and the Germans prefer organized

links in alphabetical order); the cultural symbols (the

Brazilians and Chinese feel comfortable when they

see figures on their cultures - Sugar Loaf and lotus

Flower); and the way of showing cultural symbols

(the Germans prefer textual components, whereas

the Brazilians and Chinese prefer colourful visual

components). Even considering the importance of

those subjects, developers still have difficulties in

obtaining support to their research regarding to the

interaction projected according to the users’ culture.

3 MOTIVATION FOR THE

ENGAGEMENT IN ACTIVITIES

In the literature, it is possible to find different

definitions for the term “motivation”, but all have a

common meaning: motivation is a personal internal

force to generate movement and it is a temporary

need, and it only exists while such force persist

(Bueno, 2007).

Motivation at the work environment has been

studied since 1900 (Salgado, 2005). One of the best

contributions for the area was the book "Motivation

and Personality" written by Maslow (1954) with

postulates that all humans have needs that lead them

to satisfaction and motivation, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Maslow’s need hierarchy (Maslow, 1954)

According to Salgado (2005), Maslow has

structured the human necessities in a hierarchy, such

that to satisfy one level (self-actualization) it is

required to satisfy all the previous ones and the most

basics ones should be resolved first. However, in

agreement with Henry Murray apud (Novaes, 2007),

necessity factors can act in a disordered way,

according to the different personality` characteristics

of each individual, which can be achieved

simultaneously, without a rigid hierarchy.

The colors are related to people's emotions

because each person attributes certain meanings to a

certain color, what stimulates or inhibits their desire

and degrees of satisfaction. If a person gets

motivated by a color, he will possibly be able get to

accomplish Maslow`s hierarchy of needs.

An example that can be mentioned in the

Physiology level is that if a person feels good, happy

and motivated to do something in a collaborative

site, he will not fall sleep. Assisting the physiologic

needs, the body safety will be assisted, since

depends in parts on basic needs (Safety). When

people feel safe, they can have good relationships,

either with the family or friends (Love/Belonging).

From this wealthy relationship, people will feel

better, more valued, tending to respect the others and

himself/herself (self-esteem). Consequently the

person can reach the first level of the Maslow’s need

hierarchy which is personal accomplishment during

the developed activity, through creativity,

spontaneity and detachment for contribution that can

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be only achieved when somebody feels good with

himself/herself.

3.1 Motivation in the Organization

With the globalization and technological progress,

competitiveness among the organizations has

increased, the need for continuous training has been

necessary and the processes of industrial automation

have been activated. Besides that, the demand for

better acting as collaborators' competence becomes

vital. So, organizations are always looking for

alternatives to motivate their collaborators, intending

to provide a better organizational environment and a

positive performance of their participant.

It is fundamental for the success of any

organization to have collaborators stimulated to

reach goals so that the expected and planned results

are reached and even overcome with good will and

satisfaction, because only after knowing the sources

of motivation of those involved is that one can

achieve additional, because the success of any

organization involves, undoubtedly, the level of their

collaborators' motivation (Novaes, 2007).

Bueno (2007) says that human motivation has

been one of the biggest challenges in organizational

administration for many psychologists, teachers and

executives. Some researches and theories have been

elaborated and have been trying to explain the

operation of this force apparently mysterious, or

even unknown that leads people to act in order to

reach their objectives. When a person follows a goal,

he is not necessarily motivated to reach this goal.

The factors that make him to follow that direction

can be intrinsic (internal) or extrinsic (external).

When they are intrinsic, there is motivation; when

they are extrinsic, there is either movement or

satisfaction (Bueno, 2007).

It is important to remind that the differences

among people make difficult the definition of

universal parameters that organizations can use to

motivate people in the same conditions. There is

always a subjective component in motivation that is

complex, related to culture and individual values.

For that reason this study will be taken into

consideration the common sense knowledge base of

OMCS-Br Project to try to soften that inequality of

conditions, as well as to provide solutions to assist

each individual's cultural values involved in the

collaborative task, considering his/her community.

4 COMMON SENSE TO

REPRESENT CULTURE

OMCS-Br Project (Anacleto et al., 2006) explores

the Web as a way for collaboratively constructing a

common sense knowledge base, counting on

contributions of Brazilian volunteers' statements.

Common Sense is defined here as a group of facts

known by most people, “including a wide part of

human experiences, knowledge on special, physical,

social, temporary and psychological aspects

involving daily experiences of humans” (Liu et al.,

2004) and that express of a certain group’s culture.

OMCS-Br Project can contribute to overcome

difficulties that many developers have to obtain

support from researches regarding the target user’s

culture designed for collaborative environment. This

project, to support this research, has been collected

information about what people think of certain

colors, what they remember when they see a certain

color, or which color people associate with certain

concepts presented. Currently, there are seven

templates used on OMCS-Br Project to collect

common sense knowledge on colors, objects and

emotions (Dias et al., 2009): Five templates (1-5) for

colors and objects, and three templates (6, 7, 8) for

colors and emotions according to table 1.

Table 1: Templates of common sense knowledge

collecting related the colors, objects and emotions.

Templates

1 (object) | makes me remind of color | (COLOR NAME)

2(color image) | makes me feel like | (OBJECT)

3(image color) | reminds me of a | (OBJECT)

4(color name) | makes me remind of a | (OBJECT)

5(color name) | makes me feel like | (OBJECT)

6 Color (image color) | makes me feel | (EMOTION)

7 When I am (emotion) | it reminds me of color | (COLOR NAME)

8 Color (image color)|makes me remind of color |(COLOR NAME)

According to templates in Table 1, it is observed

that there are three tables in the database, a table to

stores complete sentences entered by the site (Table

entries), a table for emotions (Table emotion),

another for names of the colors (Table colors) being

the images of colors generated randomly. The

outstanding words with capital letters are typed by

the users and feedback in other templates, the

underlined words are the words originated from of

other templates and the words in italic are generated

randomly. An example is presented in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Example of feedback in Templates.

APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB

In this example, there are two templates. The

first is the template 6 of Table 1 that collects

emotions that serve as feedback for the second

template, which is the number 7 in Table 1. From

Figure 2, is perceived as such knowledge is collected

for Common Sense which is used in the review

process. To learn how these data are organized so

they can be used the next section deals with the

classification of colors.

5 COLOR CLASSIFICATIONS

The human eye is able to discriminate perception of

thousands of different colors, but the language

display a limited number of basic terms of color.

According to Berlin and Kay (1969), every language

that has words for colors, uses from two to eleven

basic terms, and the colors not included in these

terms, are considered variant colors.

The emergence of the basic terms for color

follows a natural logic. This logic is composed by

several evolutive trends, in particular: 1) from

general to specific, i.e., from light/dark distinction to

tone discrimination, 2) from the more evident the

less - for example, red before other tones, 3) from

the simple to the complex, i.e., from the isolated

colors for mixed ones (Sahlins, 2004). The basic

terms for color are the result of social use of color

not only to mean objective differences of nature, but

also communicate significant distinctions of culture.

This work uses the classification suggested by

Berlin and Kay (1969). The eleven colors spoken by

Brazilians are: yellow, blue, white, gray, orange,

brown, black, pink, purple, green and red. As shown

in Table 1, template 8 on common sense knowledge

collection site has been developed to confirm,

through common sense that people express

themselves using a few names of colors when they

see various shades of them. Some data already

collected by template 8 can be seen in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Example of data collected by the OMCS-Br

Project site

6 COLORS AND EMOTIONS

It is known that the light of each one of the colors,

starting from the moment that it is reflected in the

eyes and processed in the mind, can affect the center

of the emotions directly. However, each person

answers to the color in a particular way. People tend

to be attracted to some colors because of some

decisive factors, such as, personality, incidental

conditions of life or in desires and deeper more

intimate and even unconscious mental processes.

Nevertheless, Berlin and Kay (1969) report that the

personal choices are conditioned to the community

culture background what is considered in our

research. Our focus is on the culture of the

community, once it involves the individual's culture.

Colors not only evoke emotions, but also can

communicate messages or transmit concepts. It is

important to stand out that in any culture, colors can

transmit good or bad meanings. Some authors

(Pastoreau, 1997), (Silveira, 2005) mention some of

those meanings for colors in the western culture:

Yellow (color for light and heat, for sun and

summer, it is associated to prosperity and wealth);

Blue (favorite color of more than half of the western

population, color of water); Green (color of fortune

and money, nature, ecology); Red (color of danger,

prohibition, love and passion).

According to Dias et al. (2009) from that list of

meanings of the colors, then we find the need for

integration between colors and emotions to a better

light of the decisions of design of collaborative

computing environments to be developed. The

following subsections present the colors in the web

and the colors based on common sense that can be

used in the design of computational promoting the

motivation and the importance of considering the

emotions in the Web.

6.1 Colors in Web Context

According to Silveira et al. (2005), talking about

colors guarantees a debate full of controversies and a

lot of discussion, as it is a complex study and

basically interdisciplinary. For Pastoreau (1997), it

is possible to identify characteristics attributed to the

culture that the individual is inserted through the

study of symbology of colors, what helps the Web

designer take advantage of that knowledge, besides

noticing the collective meaning of colors in that

community.

For Silveira et al. (2005), to use just intuition for

color projects in the Web can work, but most of the

time it doesn't happen. For this reason, intuition

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should be used added to a lot of information and

certain types or reasoning to get harmony, so that the

designer doesn't take the risk of elaborating an

unpleasant chromatic composition and driving the

project to a no-communication between user and the

system and, consequently, among people members

of the collaborative work team. To decrease the

chance of make a mistake, we propose to analyze the

common sense knowledge from a certain community

(Brazilians) and the relation among color, emotions,

actions and objects. From that analysis we are going

to formalize motivational patterns for Web design.

6.1.1 Colors based on the Common Sense

Knowledge

From the OMCS-Br Project, it can be collected

several meanings for colors related to the culture of

individuals from a certain community. An example

can be seen in Table 2 that illustrates the sentences

built by people registered in the site.

Table 2: Examples of sentences collected by OMCS-Br

Project, related to Templates 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in Table 1.

sky makes me remind of color blue

makes me feel like dipping in the pool

reminds me of a ocean

light blue makes remind a sky

blue makes me feel like swimming

According to the sample shown in Table 2, it can

be seen that blue color is related to water by most

people, which can be inferred that when a Web

designer will projects a site to a enterprise to work

collaboratively using blue color most of the team

members will tend to think in something related to

water, relaxing, and comfortable due to the blue tone

of the site, reflecting on the individual motivation

and the group productivity.

However, the emotions wakened from that

memory can hardly be inferred by people that are

not specialist in psychology, anthropology or similar

areas. The following subsection deals with the direct

association that the people make between colors and

emotions in the OMCS-Br Project.

6.2 Emotions in the Web Context

Emotion is defined as any restlessness and trouble of

the mind, or feeling or passion; any vehement or

excited mental state (Soto, 2005). An emotion-

producer stimulus originates an emotional answer

(inner reaction) that acts as a motivator stimulus that

takes to an expression of the emotion which is the

external reaction or emotional behaviour, as shown

in Figure 4.

According to Soto (2005), emotion is the

emotional behaviour or answer facing one emotional

state which turns into incentive. The function of

emotion is to provide to the organism the level of

arousal (pleasure or displeasure experience)

according to the emission of the most appropriated

answer to each specific situation. Emotion

predisposes people to a certain answer, alternatively:

(I) to get what can be useful to satisfy the needs; (II)

to avoid what can be opposed to that satisfaction.

Figure 4: Reaction chain to emotion produces stimulus.

Therefore, it is noticed that emotion is an

important issue in human behaviour and it assumes

significant role in the motivational process. Besides,

that emotion requires great level of arousal, which is

the product of subsequent physiological changes to

the activation of the nervous system.

6.2.1 Emotions based on the Common Sense

Knowledge

Some templates have been created for the OMCS-Br

Project to collect common sense knowledge related

to emotion. People tend to relate an emotion when

seeing a certain color and when speaking about a

color they remember to feel a certain emotion. Some

examples can be seen in Table 3.

Table 3: Examples of sentences collected by OMCS-Br

Project, related to Templates 6 and 7 in Table 1.

Color makes me feel JOY FUL

Color makes me feel CALM

Color makes me feel QUIET

Color makes me feel JOY FUL

Color makes me feel HAPPINESS

6 When I am passionate it reminds me the color RED

7 When I am happy it reminds me the color YELLOW

8 When I am depressed it reminds me the color BLUE

9 When I am aggressive it reminds me the color RED

10 When I am sleepy it reminds me the color BABY

BLUE

APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB

In table 3 it is observed that the blue colors can

be related to several characteristics such as: to be

cheerful, calm, depressed; while the red colors are

related to passion or aggressiveness. However a

wide study on the common sense knowledge base is

being developed, to notice the cultural association of

colors and emotions, not only personal choices.

It is known that motivation is essential for

running organizations. No matter the amount of

machines, equipments or activities an organization

has, those elements cannot be used if people are

neither motivated nor engaged in their tasks

(Novaes, 2007). That is the intention here – to give

some support to motivate people to get engaged into

their Web-based tasks.

7 USING COLORS OF COMMON

SENSE TO CLASSIFICATE

EMOTIONS

To analyze the information these templates collect it

is being done a classification of emotions, actions

and objects. Figure 5 shows an example with the red

color, where the square shows the color to be

analyzed. The list of emotions that red evokes in

people is show in the left ellipse. In the back ellipse,

the actions that people are willing to perform when

they see the red color. The right ellipse brings the

objects related to the red color. See

http://www.dc.ufscar.br/~ana_dias/esquema.html for

all colors analyzed.

Figure 5: The red color associated to actions, emotions and

objects.

8 CONCLUSION

According to the hypothesis explored in this work,

individual motivation and participation in work via

Web are encouraged by the application of colors in

the computing environment design. Therefore, its

success is achieved when other variables are

considered in this application of color, exploring the

cultural meanings that evoque stimulus and action.

This application of colors can determine the

individual`s degree of engagement and participation.

We believe that information comprehension happens

when culture is respected, facilitating, through

colors and their meanings, the access to information

and contextualized knowledge. For these

considerations happen, assessments are being made

from the common sense knowledge base of potential

users to collaborative Web environments.

In the future, from the analysis of colors

collected in common sense, this work intends to

formalize Motivational Patterns, which describe

social processes (intrinsic motivation) and may

propose either changes or extensions to secondary

tech support as it is traditional in design patterns

(extrinsic motivations) (Schümmer et al., 2007).

There are some formalized Motivational Patterns

(Clear et al., 2005), (Schümmer et al., 2007). None

of these papers, however, explore the question about

the use of color in Web design for collaboration

promotion, the need to consider issues involving the

users` culture in collaborative work sites, as well as

the correlation between these two elements - color

and culture - to promote universal access to

information. Additionally, this work will extend to

people with some problems, such as: daltonism or

others disabilities.

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APLYING COLORS BASED ON CULTURE KNOWLEDGE TO MOTIVATE COLLABORATION ON THE WEB