Lessons from Leaders - Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic

Last month, Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic was the special guest for our Sustainable Design Speaker Series, where students, faculty, and alumni gathered for a presentation titled (IM)PERFECT COLOUR: Challenging Acceptability Through Sustainable Colour Choices. The talk explored how unstandardized colour palettes, salvaged pigments, and visible recycled content can influence consumer attitudes—transforming perceived imperfections into desirable design features. You can listen to her presentation here.

This month, I had the opportunity to interview her for a follow-up conversation, Lessons from Leaders, which expands on the themes of her presentation.

Reflecting on your presentation, what was the key takeaway you'd like the audience to remember?

The central message is that imperfection in color, manifested through irregularity, variation, and unpredictability—can serve as a deliberate and powerful aesthetic strategy to signal sustainability, material history, and emotional authenticity. We live in a world conditioned by synthetic, standardized color systems—born from the industrial revolution’s emphasis on reproducibility, precision, and commercial appeal. This pursuit of “perfect color” has reinforced rigid expectations around consistency and quality, often at the cost of ecological responsibility and cultural diversity. However, as we shift toward circular and regenerative design models, these standards must be challenged. The use of recycled, bio-based, or locally sourced materials inherently introduces color variability. Rather than seeing this as a flaw to be corrected, we must reframe it as a visual language of sustainability—a form of material storytelling that makes visible the process behind the product. A product that embraces its irregularities feels more personal, unique, and expressive. These human qualities can foster deeper connections between users and objects, extending lifespans and reducing disposability.

Color imperfection is a tool for building meaning, shifting perceptions, and designing for a future where sustainability is both functional and beautifully expressive.

How do you see Challenging Acceptability Through Sustainable Colour Choices progressing in the next few years?

In the coming years, I believe we’ll likely see a growing acceptance of visible recycled color and unstandardized palettes, evolving from a niche design philosophy into a broader cultural and industrial shift. As climate urgency grows and circularity becomes central to design, aesthetic expectations around color will need to adjust in tandem with material innovation. Color will no longer be just an afterthought or finishing touch—it will become an active reflection of a product’s lifecycle and ethics. From my point of view, three main interwoven trajectories will likely shape this progression. First, material-led color design will rise: designers will increasingly work with the inherent colors of recycled, repurposed, or biomaterial inputs rather than masking or correcting them. We’re already seeing this with bio-fabricated dyes, bacterial pigments, and upcycled plastics with embedded speckles. In the future, the unpredictability of color will be part of the design brief, not a deviation from it. This approach will demand tighter collaboration between colorists, material scientists, and manufacturers. Second, consumers will redefine what ‘quality’ looks like: one of the biggest barriers to sustainable color imperfection today is consumer perception—many still associate irregularities with defectiveness or low value. But that’s changing. As younger generations prioritize ethical consumption, there’s a growing openness to imperfection when it's framed as a sign of authenticity, environmental consciousness, and individuality. And third, we’ll see a cultural and ethical reckoning with color norms: color norms are deeply cultural, often shaped by Western industrial ideals and colonial legacies of uniformity, control, and synthetic purity. Moving forward, we’ll likely see more efforts to decolonize color expectations—bringing in diverse perspectives and practices that already value irregularity, spontaneity, and nature’s palette. This could foster a global, pluralistic vision of color design rooted in resilience and respect. So, I think soon, challenging acceptability through sustainable color choices won’t just mean tolerating imperfection—it will mean redefining perfection altogether. It’s a cultural shift that asks us to expand our visual language to include the ecological, emotional, and ethical dimensions of color, where imperfection will be reframed as a signal of care, creativity, and connection.

What advice would you give to someone looking to get started in your field or area of expertise?

To get started in the field of color design, the most important thing is to approach color not just as a mere aesthetic element, but as a complex language—one that communicates emotion, function, context, culture, and increasingly, ethics. Begin by cultivating your curiosity and sensitivity to color in the world around you. Observe how colors shift in natural light, how they appear on different materials, how they age, how they are influenced by memory, geography, or identity. These observations will sharpen your intuition and deepen your creative experience. Also, getting trained is important — color can be learned to make more professional and informed decisions in design. Understanding the basics of color perception, material interaction, digital color, and standard color communication systems is essential. But just as important is learning how color can tell stories, evoke meanings, or provoke emotion. As you begin to work with color, don’t fear experimentation or so-called mistakes. Let imperfection guide you—some of the most innovative color outcomes come from accidents, misalignments, or unintended reactions. Whether you’re working with natural dyes, recycled materials, or synthetic media, allow for unpredictability and treat each result as part of a learning process. Stay curious, stay observant, and let color surprise you. That’s where the magic begins.

Were there any surprises or unexpected moments during your journey that shaped your perspective?

Yes, when I started more than 15 years ago, I was very surprised by the low status that color has concerning other elements of design. I realized that color was almost not taught, having little space in design education programs, even in some of the most important design schools in the world. This situation leaves students and designers with a lack of knowledge, resources, and practical tools to tackle complex and contemporary color challenges. Also, when color is taught, it is usually approached from a theoretical -and usually outdated- point of view, very detached from the current issues that design is facing today, such as sustainability, decolonization, behavioral change, AI, and wellbeing, to name a few. Therefore, design practitioners struggle in understanding the important role that color has in real life beyond abstract theory, and how to use it consciously for communicating with users, besides improving the material and natural environment around us, and our human experience of the world. Even if great efforts have been made during the years to raise awareness about color in design and to foster meaningful color education in the design discipline, there is still a lot to do to build the needed interdisciplinary bridges and shift the perception of color’s value in people’s minds. That has been my crusade for a few years now, and my research work and this talk are very much about that.

How do you stay motivated and continue to grow professionally?

I stay inspired by collaborating across interdisciplinary fields of research and practice. Over the past few years, I’ve been involved in projects spanning diverse areas of design—visual communication, product, environmental, fashion, architecture—as well as disciplines beyond design, such as heritage conservation, museography, medicine, mining, sustainability, and traditional crafts. These are all contexts where color challenges naturally emerged and called for research-based solutions. What I find most fascinating about my work is that people often come to me with a “color issue”—sometimes without even realizing it. Other times, they’re aware of the problem but can’t envision how to approach it. This makes every project a fresh opportunity for experimentation and exploration. Color as a field is incredibly rich—it’s complex and vast, yet deeply connected to nearly every aspect of human experience. This intersection keeps the work dynamic and creatively charged. There’s always something new to learn, to question, or to observe differently. Teaching also plays a crucial role in how I stay engaged. I lecture in higher education for design and creative disciplines, and the continuous dialogue with students pushes me to refine my thinking, challenge my assumptions, and stay open to new perspectives.

What do you see as the next big trend or challenge as it relates to more ethical and sustainable color choices and its integration into the field of sustainable design?

One of the fundamental challenges in achieving more ethical color choices lies in the need for a paradigm shift—one that fully acknowledges the role of color and its environmental impact, particularly in manufacturing processes such as dyeing and pigment production, which are major contributors to global pollution. This issue is further compounded by social and ethical concerns, such as the reinforcement of wasteful consumption patterns driven by short-lived trends. Sustainable color choices must be treated as a core component of the design process—not as a decorative, superficial, or merely finishing element. Embracing this perspective is essential at multiple levels: from the early ideation and design phases, through industrial and manufacturing processes, to marketing and communication strategies, and ultimately within consumer culture and perceptions of value.

To make meaningful progress, collaboration across multiple stakeholders is essential. Every actor in the value chain must be engaged, with large companies and the color industries playing a leading role as ambassadors of change. We must move beyond the marketing logic of constantly shifting color trends—such as "color of the year" campaigns—and instead advocate for longer-lasting, more meaningful color experiences that better align with people’s real needs and values. Consumers are increasingly demanding more responsible and sustainable color decisions from brands and industries. In response, I believe the most important emerging trend will be the institutionalization of sustainable thinking within color design practices, education, and cultural discourse. By doing so, we can unlock the full potential of color as a tool for addressing complex sustainability challenges in a more conscious and impactful way.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?

Yes—we need to radically rethink our relationship with color, not just as an aesthetic choice, but as a cultural, sustainable, and ethical force. Color isn’t neutral—it’s deeply embedded in the way we produce, consume, and value things. Yet in design practice, it’s often still treated as a final, decorative step. That mindset is outdated, and it’s limiting our ability to respond meaningfully to the environmental and social challenges we face. We need systemic change, but we also need personal, small-scale, and experimental acts of resistance to the standardized aesthetics that dominate the market, such as embracing color imperfection— if we can see beauty in the irregular and the unfinished, we’re not only designing more sustainably, but we’re also redefining what design can mean. Color is a lens through which we can reimagine how we design, how we live, and how we care for the world around us.