Living Color: Designing through synesthesia
I’m seven-years old, sitting on the playground at elementary school, surrounded by my pint-sized peers from class. With the school’s spelling bee rapidly approaching, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do some prep work. One of the boys, in a flurry of false bravado, claims he can spell anything. Naturally, we opt to test his conceit. “Spell minute,” someone shouts out. With a cocky grin he replies, “M-I-N-I-T.”
I look at him like, what? Can you believe this guy? I take it upon myself to be the one to correct him. And then it happens. In just a few words, I forever change my life. “That’s not right,” I blurt out. “You need yellow in there and blue at the end.”
Everyone grows really quiet. They look at me like I’m from a different planet. Why? What did I do? A girl cracks, “Yellow? Blue? What does that mean?” I nervously say, “Well, ‘U’ is yellow and ‘E’ is blue so you actually spell it M-I-N-U-T-E.”
More silence. It’s a deafening sound and the first time I really understand that the way I process things is very different from my classmates.Here’s the thing. My brain sees letters and numbers as a color palette — the exact same color palette for as long as I can remember. For example, if you write the number ‘20’ in green on a white piece of paper, I see green on the page but if I look away, I see a light blue “2” and a black “0” in my mind.
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