Every designer has noticed that specific seafoam green in photos of mid-century control rooms. It shows up in nuclear plants, NASA mission control, old hospitals. Wasn’t the hospital in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that color? It’s too consistent to be coincidence.

Beth Mathews traced the origin back to color theorist Faber Birren, who consulted for DuPont and created the industrial color safety codes still in use today. His reasoning:

“The importance of color in factories is first to control brightness in the general field of view for an efficient seeing condition. Interiors can then be conditioned for emotional pleasure and interest, using warm, cool, or luminous hues as working conditions suggest. Color should be functional and not merely decorative.”

Color should be functional and not merely decorative. These weren’t aesthetic choices—they were human factors engineering decisions, made in environments where one mistake could be catastrophic. The seafoam green was specifically chosen to reduce visual fatigue. Kinda cool.