Geun-Ly Park, a master candidate of CED Lab published an article entitled as “Development of Color Flavor Scale, the database of gustative experience through colour” in the Design Archive, formally called Korean Journal of Design Studies. A senior scientist of the Korea Food Research Institute, Dr.Yoon-Sook Kim co-authored the paper. This study proposes a “Color Flavor Scale”, which was later developed as the database of the book, “Koreans’ Colors, Tastes, & Styles(한국인의 색, 맛, 멋)” published from Yelim Books.

Abstract

By adopting three levels of cognitive processing for humans, emotional responses to food color were distinguished and categorized into three stages: the visceral stage, cognitive stage and reflective stage, and were embodied in three stages of gustatory experience as follows. First, the stage of determining which colors are identified as food colors was the stage of intuitive experience. The colors derived from this stage were used in the composition of the food color palette. Second, the next stage had the role of quantifying the relationship between color and taste and presented results that help understand the intensity of the dimensions of taste with regard to color attributes. Finally, as the highest stage covering the overall taste-related experiences, the final stage involved the composition and organization of contents that could be used to propose instances that express culinary images through the appearance of certain colors. User research, quantitative method and qualitative analysis were used complementarily in each stage. The results of this experiment will be employed to propose the “Color Flavor Scale,” a database highly applicable to real-life situations.

Full text in the Design Archive(=Korean Journal of Design Studies)