The wood figure is a crucial wood trait that contributes to its versatile applications, drawing attention and inspiring imagination. This study aims to elucidate the impact of color attributes on the visual perception of wood figures. Initially, using intelligent methods (interactive color palettes), we colored six typical figures of natural wood (Acer.) as sample images. These images were characterized by entropy values, and assessed by simulated visual saliency (ITTI model) and subjective questionnaires. Finally, we discussed how different color quantities and schemes affect complexity and visual saliency of wood figures. The results indicate that changes in color attributes significantly impact the visual perception of wood figures. When the number of replacement colors is four, both the change rate in image complexity and the mean visual saliency are at their highest, at 24% and 0.335 respectively. Among the colors red, yellow, and green, red tends to influence the intensity of visual saliency more, the subjective complexity of green is higher. In addition, we found that more complex figures are less affected by changes in color attributes, and people can also distinguish the degree of difference between figure types well.

To unleash the emotional potential of natural fibre materials in sustainable development and utilisation, this paper presents a material-driven design method with emotional and ecological indicators (E²-MDD). The method offers product-level solutions for the sustainable development of natural materials. The method involves several steps, such as screening the main material quality, capturing the user emotion vision, deconstructing the E² vision pattern, and deducting the product design concept. The method was tested on luffa sponge samples, seen as one kind of traditional fibre resource, which resulted in four differentiated schemes, which were evaluated using the E²-MDD ring radar column score chart. The study identified three key emotional qualities for natural fibre materials: associativity, uniqueness, and biophilicity. The results show that product concepts closer to the natural material’s original form scored higher, while the inclusion of non-natural materials had a negative impact on the evaluations. This study also found that E²-MDD could strengthen the emotional and ecological connection between people and products, further indicating that material and design can establish a link between environmental friendliness and emotional experience. Lastly, the paper suggests future development areas for the E²-MDD method, including focusing on users, ecology, and business.