Is package design suffering from a dead-end mentality? - page.12 - 13
- Package designers have failed to consider a 'second life' for their creations for good reasons; packages were simply never intended to be reused.
- The present era of disposable convenience, which has lasted less than half a century, is quickly approaching its end - by necessity. Before this era, people imaginatively used and reused any object they could obtain, including packages for consumer goods.
- Our recent shortsighted splurge on disposability for disposability's sake is luxury that the world can no longer afford.
- It's no longer risky for graphic designers to suggest pursuing 'green' printing options to clients. Only a few years ago, such suggestions elicited derision and cynicism.
- However, companies around the world are searching for sustainable alternatives to their printed matter and packaging, and graphic designers have an opportunity to reimagine the end of another one.
- The dead-end, one-way street that our contemporary packages end up on happens to be the only street that we, as a species, have.
- The catch is that now graphic designers must expand their field of expertise and accept this new responsibility.
- They must learn to navigate this new terrain, and incorporate a solid understanding of sustainable options into every projects.
- This trend can empower savvy graphic designers to provide a valuable consulting service to their clients, thus helping increase the company's 'triple bottom line.'
Research | design | research | design... - page.22 - 25
- The designer begins with an investigation into the targeted consumer's behaviour and preferences..
- While packaging is one part of a much larger marketing mix which includes advertising, e-commerce and direct marketing, once the consumer has arrived at a retail site, a more immediate relationship between package, product and consumer predominates.
- The process of on-sitre persuasion that begins with the visual allure of a package - its size, shape, colour scheme and graphic and typographic charm - must then live up to the physical experience consumers have once the package is in their hands. The proof of touching. The physical interaction can instantaneously trigger a consumer's decision - making process.
- Packages that 'feel right' in the hand usually live up to the best advertising and marketing and, furthermore, can often transcend all but the worst advertising and marketing.
- 'Behaviour studies' - observing consumer behaviour in settings that obscure the fact that the subjects are being watched - usually provide a more accurate reflection of normalised behaviour.
- Individual deeply biased, derived from personal histories and brand favouritism, so much so that an accurate baseline of package-to-consumer relationship is difficult to determine.
- It has been shown 30 per cent of shelf brands are not even viewed by consumers.
- Packages are not handled because they are unattractive or because they are completely invisible to a consumer's quick shelf-scan.
Fundamental concepts of package design - page. 26
- Distinctive package form can help define product personality and brand essence. Several important considerations regarding various aspects of package design, from technical prerequisites to human perception are discussed.
- Package is a functional tool that fulfils the various requirements of commerce.
- Brand hierarchy to the practicalities of transportation, containment, storage, display, end-use and disposal.
- Package must also be: attractive, dispensable, have an identity, inform consumers, and persuasion.
- A well-design package must provide the consumer with convenience even as it strives to define style and essential brand qualities.
What's the problem? Part 1: Organisational procedures without vision - page. 28 - 29
- Considering John Thackara's statement that 'eighty per cent of environmental impact if the products, services and infrastructure around us is determined at the design stage', designers are not as helpless in the area of sustainable change and client influence as they often think.
- The first problem to overcome when considering the move towards more sustainable practices in package design; that of connectivity and communication.
- A properly executed lifecycle analysis (LCA) of package's hidden cost is essential when assessing the degree of ecological damage attributed to its entire lifespan. A LCA looks closely at the entire range of factors, form 'upstream' costs such as energy consumption, raw materials extraction, transportation, infrastructure, toxic, by=product and habitat and climate impacts.
- 'downstream costs such as distribution, consumer convenience, product protection (criminal encroachment as well as breakage and spoilage), shelf storage, marketing needs, disposal and recyclability.
- What role does a graphic designer have in this cycle?
- While the traditional role of a graphic designer places them somewhere between the marketing and advertising department, graphic designers who are engaged with the larger playing field of visual communications, and who take their role as systematic thinker and problem-solver.
- Designers hope to contribute to the paradigm shift towards sustainability must make design decisions based on what they understand of the entire process to which there work us applied.
What's the problem? Part 2: Packaging procedures without vision - page. 30 - 31
- Solid Waste - over 68 million tonnes (75 million tons) of packaging materials enter the US waste stream every year (the total amount of municipal solid waste in the US for 2005 million tonnes was 222 million tonnes (245 millions tons) - EPA). Imagine for each state in the Union. This amount of rubbish does not just stay there. As it slowly breaks sown, toxins to inks, adhesive to bleached pulp and plastics leach into surrounding soil and water sources.
- Water Pollution - more than a billion people use unsafe sources of drinking water. Daniel Imhoff, author of Paper and Plastic, it 'ranks third in hazardous effluent due to the pluping and bleaching processes, which places it behind only chemical and steel industries.
- Air Pollution - each step of materials development requires massive amount of energy, and the energy burned creates significant amounts of air pollutions.
- The ill-health effects that result from breathing air pollution are too numerous to list here, but the World Health Organisation estimated the in 2002, three million deaths resulted from all sources of air pollution.
- Forest Depletion - The Rainforest Alliance estimates that 40 hectares (100 acres) of tropical rainforest are lost every minute.
- Depletion of other Raw Materials - John Thackara, in his book In The Bubble: Designing For A Complex World, note that a product or package represents approximately eight per cent of the actual material used to create it.
- Energy Consumption - the primary environmental problems with packaging is in the energy consumption within its lifecycle. Such as manufacturing cycle and energy required for transportation.
- 'We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the work. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us.' - Wendell Berry.
Package design and sustainability: constructing a future - page. 33.
- Package designers have many dilemma: very few other disciplines are engaged in the process of materials consumption.
- We use natural resources in our packages as a means of persuading consumers to purchase products which are themselves the culmination of material extraction, consumption and production.
- Package designer habit of compounding materials consumption in ways that are simply not sustainable.
Rethinking the very methods of imagining form and function will address the changing ecological and social needs of our world culture - page 34 to 35.
- our present productions, consumption and disposal are destroying our global life-support system. In the book Natural Capitalism, author Hawkins, Lovins and Lovins put it in this way: 'In the past three decades alone, for instance, one-third of the planet's resources, its "natural wealth," has been consumed.'
- Trend that young designers might want to rebel against.
- Author tell us: 'A major German retailer found that 98 per cent of all secondary packaging - boxes around toothpaste tubes, plastic wrap around ice-cream cartons - is simply unnecessary'.
- Remarkably high percentage; even at 50 per cent, such a trend embodies gross inefficiency.
- In 2001, Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren wrote there book Packaging Prototypes 3: Thinking Green, a genuinely helpful text for anyone interested in the effects of ecological unsustainable packaging, and the positive steps that were being taken at the time to alter ways in which we thought about materials consumption.
- Previous 20 years, observing that consumers in the late 1980s could no longer ignore the negative repercussions of their consumptive habits. Visible negative impact of overconsumption.
- 'signals could no longer be ignored and the ecological agenda became firmly etched in economic, political and social ideology'.
- Given the still-accelerating state of the environmental degradation, that Dension and Yu Ren were overly optimistic in their assessment of the global mindset, and in their hopes for significant change.
- 'that the momentum established by these early environmental success are not lost subsequent waves of economic and consumer rationalism.'
- Increased environmental damage our consumptive habits have since wrought. If not the actions of the individuals around the world, then at least in the collective conscience.
- Graphic designers must help facilitate this trend towards sustainability.
- As designers search for inspiration in the great modernist movements of the past, they must remember the innovators in these movements were not merely exploring new styles; they are suggesting new ways of thinking about the design's relationship with its culture.
Sustainability: an introduction - page. 36 to 37
- 'Sustainability is not a new concept.'
- 'A sustainable society s one which satisfies its needs without diminishing the prospects of the future generations'. - Lester R Brown, the Founder and President of Worldwatch Institute.
- Sustainable culture is one which satisfies its needs without diminishing the needs off other cultures, and a sustainable economy is one which satisfies its needs without diminishing the needs of other economies.
- This is because sustainability is not all about one limited range of thought and interaction. Instead, it is a holistic attempt to mimic the best behaviours of the natural environment.
- Low Toxicity - while cradle-to cradle practices make some allowance for the potential reuse of toxic chemicals, lee caustic materials can often be substituted. In a theme common sustainable thinking, an improvement in one area is often related to improvements in others. For instance, the use of less-toxics inks allows for higher rates of recycling and compostability. Advancements in production have made less-toxics substitutes cheaper and more accessible.
- Renewable energy - the market within renewable energy continues to grow, so much so that there are many paper companies and printing facilities that provide service that make use pf renewable energy sources.
- Reuse/Recycle - Reuse is a common practice on factory floors and residential neighbourhoods, and everywhere in between. The rate a which certain materials are recycled can be improved with the initiation of comprehensive collie action systems. Without the proper systems, individual recycling practices can be less productive.
- Compostability - It is common that organic materials trapped in traditional dumps so not break down efficiently. Creating a packaging that can directly into the compost heap - or at least an industrial composting company - can significantly lower the waste stream. Composting is also a way to to give back to the natural systems that provides so much for the human survival.
- While the preceding pages categorise sustainability issues by areas of potential impact, the following pages focus one specific areas of materials usage, from paper and plastic to inks and adhesives.
- Graphic designers have long understood the importance of visiting the printers they use for their projects.
- 'Perhaps there should be no special category called "sustainable design". It might be simpler to assume that all designers will try to reshape their values and their work, so that all designs is based in humility, combines objective aspects of climate and the ecological use of materials with subjective intuitive processes..' - Victor Papanek.
Following the stream: cleaner at the outset often means cleaner at the end - page. 46 to 47
- 'The most serious external costs of packaging lie in the extraction of natural resources, energy consumption and the emission of air and water pollutions throughout the manufacturing processes.' - Daniel Imhoff.
- Cradle-To-Cradle - A blossom that does not take hold as a new seedling is not waste because it becomes nutrition for the ecosystem that feeds the tree to begin with.
- Waste = Food, a philosophy espoused by McDonough and Braungart, encourages the isolation of two two closed-loop systems of materials use so that each loop can run in a perpetual cycle of reuse. The biological loop includes all biodegradable materials. The technological loop includes non-biogradgable synthetics and hazardous materials that either toxic to the biosphere or simply do not biodegrade. This is not recycling, because recycling down cycles materials, in that the quality of the material is less than its original quality. In cradle-to-cradle systems, quality is not compromised with the regenerating cycles.
- Compostability - most common element that makes paper products from being certifiably compostable are inks and adhesives.
- Within these commercial composting facilities, packages that make use of new bioplastics, like the bottle that Biota water comes in, can biodegrade in a matter of months without leaving any toxic residue.
Who is looking after sustainability? - page. 48 - 49
- South Korea is liability on their consumers. Charging for waste disposal and thus encouraging consumer behaviour that favours products with less packaging.
- Regulation, as William McDonough often states, is a sign of design failure. 'You don't filter smokestacks... Instead, you put the filter in your head and design the problem out of existence.'
Chapter 3: Sustainability in the professional realm - page. 57
- Cleaning up age packaging industry..
- The Sustainable Packaging coalition (SPC) was created expressly to drive change within the packaging industry.
- These entrepreneurs are changing the way businesses' relationship to humanity and nature are defined, and applauding their efforts is a certain first step towards spreading their innovative spirit.
- The hope in presenting such a weeping look at how various participants in the package design industry interact is that graphic designers feel empowered, with a deeper understanding of the variables they must contend with as they approach a package-design project, and understand that all segments of the industry are in process of embracing real and quantifiable sustainable change.
Interview: Anne Johnson - Director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition - page. 64 - 65 - 66 - 67
- 'Sustainable packaging is all about systems thinking; it's not just the packaging but also about the materials systems that relate to the package.' - Anna Johnson
- Graphic designers and sustainability:
- Sustainable design is discussed in the context of an expanded definition of quality. We have to optimise resources, responsible sourcing, material health and resource recovery to the traditional design objectives of cost, performance, aesthetic and regulatory compliance.
- Q) How can graphic designers stay abreast of advancements in sustainable packaging? There are a number of sustainable packaging newsletters offered by the mainstream packaging trade press. Packaging Strategies, Packaging Digest and Packaging Worlds all have sustainable packaging newsletters or portions of their magazines dedicated to the topic.
- Q) What are the ways in which graphic designers can contribute to a change in client mentality? By helping conveying the significants of a lifecycle thinking will create the mental infrastructure for longer-term thinking about how we design solutions between and the sustainable future we need for us children.
Case Study: Starbucks Coffee Company - page. 68 to 69
- 'The Starbucks design team continued its 'greening' process by using 100 per cent post-consumer waste paper from domestic sources, and eliminating pulp bleaching.'
- Starbucks Coffee Company has been committed to minimising the environment impacts of its business practice since it inception.
- Starbucks clearly understands the importance of operating sustainably. 'We have a responsibility to sustainably source and manage our materials, but it's very difficult for one company to address this is issue alone,' states Margaret Papadakis.
- A primary objective in the sustainable redesign process was material reduction, because the multiple layers in the old package weren't necessary for protecting the product, and the resulting source reduction would translate into savings in materials.
- 'The key is thinking about the total lifecycle of the material during the design phase to make it possible for recovery'.
- The lightweight packaging process began with using thinner paperboard, and continued with the elimination of the interior tray and the reduction of the outside sleeve from one that fully enclosed the product to one that covered only as much of the bottom of the bag as necessary to provide the package with vertical sustainability.
- 'When designing for recycling, foil-stamping in highly discouraged because it cannot be stripped off the paper during the recycling process. It does force our creative group to be more innovative with their designs so they are engaging without having to depend on traditional methods of execution.'
Interview: Joshua Onysko - Founder and CEO of Pangea Organics - page. 78 to 79
- 'How much energy is spent taking this hard tree and making it so soft and pliable? Imagine the energy it takes to make a two-by-four into a pair of panties - that's how much energy is required.' - Joshua Onysko.
- Q) How can graphic designers help make a difference in the packaging industry? There's a ad that shows a family having all kinds if problems in their lives, and at the end it states that they don't need a therapist, they need an architect. Many problems can solve the world with simple tweaks in design. There are two things that cause most of the problems in the world. One is information (lack of) and the other is miscommunication. Usually both of these things can be solved with good design.
- Designers need to understand how powerful their minds are. Design will solve the problems of the world.
- If it's being designed, after all, it means somebody's going to use it.
- Q) What do you see as the main hurdles on the way to a sustainable future? Consumer education. The bamboo fabrics is the perfect example of that. People get a warm and fuzzy feeling because bamboo makes great flooring, but making clothes or sheets out of the same material is not necessarily sustainable. We have to start thinking and educating beyond how we presently behave, and eliminate our simplistic understanding of the world. I would say that two per cent of designers strive to design above and beyond what they think their consumers want.
Interview: Nicole F. Smith - Environmental Director, Design & Source Productions, Inc. page. 94 to 95
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