Emotions and Colors in a Design Archiving System: Applying AI Technology for Museums

This study proposes a new museum archiving system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It suggests a new retrieval interface to extract emotional characteristics of the design work to enrich the archiving database. A virtual curation was organized to showcase the proposed archiving system. We focused on finding emotional signals with advanced technology because humans build trust and connect with each other through emotional cues. There are numerous characteristics of a single work of art, but we focused on the emotions that viewers can feel when they appreciate the art and share a connection with the artists who made the work. The research was focused on design works, and the metadata were designed to extract three dominant colors and match them with emotional adjectives to enrich the data on the paintings. The purpose of this study was to provide information for new techniques of color utilization that encapsulate emotional adjectives. Through this research, we developed an image retrieval system based on metadata and transformed intangible emotions of design work into data. With the emotion archiving system, we organized virtual curation, adding a Korean design history collection with emotional words.