Color Application in Educational Spaces for Children with Autism

Colors can be a communicative tool between autism children and the world, where they are not able to communicate with. In fact, these children have lost their ability to recognize their spatial position in spaces due to brain problems and they are unable to communicate with others and ask questions from them to find out about their spatial position. Hence, given the strong memory of these children in understanding and recognizing the visual information, colors can be used as one of the most available visual signs for defining and encoding various activities and spaces for these individuals. Colors can represent these individuals in which part of the space they should be and where and how perform a given activity. Thus, the colors give meaning to the meaningless world of the autistic children through the establishment of communication between these children and the world around them. Therefore, without color signs, these children are faced with anxiety and fear of being in an unknown and unpredictable space. The fear and anxiety can leave negative impact on the education of these individuals. Hence, the importance of using color is evident in autism educational environments. Accordingly, this research was conducted to review the application of appropriate colors in the design of educational environments for autistic children. Finally, by reviewing and investigating the studies related to the subject of this paper, it was shown that proper application of colors in the definition of educational spaces can be effective in reducing anxiety, keeping the peace of mind, concentration and consequently, improving the learning process and treatment of these children.