Color as a New Skin: Technology and Personalization

What color is associated with technology and technological objects? Observing the consistent quantity of metalized, pearly white, and satin black products (laptops, mobile phones, domestic appliances), one wonders whether there should be a universally shared grammar for the design of technological objects. It is as if the limitation of color, smooth packaging, and satiny surfaces could highlight how precious and high-performing the technological equipment hidden inside is. This chapter highlights some stories where individuals use layers of color (paint, stickers, decorations) to cover their technological objects, thus inscribing new meaning onto them. This resemantization of objects through colored layers becomes a strategy and an individual and social practice for questioning and contesting orders of reality. In particular this chapter analyzes the use of color stickers and objects in taxis, mostly their dashboards, as a means of encoding more personalized symbolic worlds, at the crossroads of multiple, dislocated, and radically different social and cultural articulations.