Can color transcend culture?

The taboo approach toward color emphasizes its negative implications within highly contextualized cultural events. Depending on the situation, yellow may be a sign of mourning, red a sign of communism, and white a sign of death. While the taboo approach to color is an important part of human-computer interaction, its full impact is questionable in relation to a small set of universal color prototypes. This paper presents data illustrating and explaining color prototypes and then suggests possibilities for their application in computing systems.