Sequence, Efficiency & Time in Design — BP&O
This post is a provocation to think more about order, time and space in packaging design. To take pleasure in the often overlooked and banal necessities of packaging, to build up details such as the mechanism of opening into a spatial and performative moment or the sequencing of information as a mediation of time by the designer to a product, to layer it with an intangible value.
Packaging is an experience. It is interactive. This is a basic claim. Its external design may attract attention, tell a story, secure and move a product, but packaging design is rarely viewed as a sequential and performative action in space and time, as movement and transition between outside and inside through a mechanism that is expanded in terms of color, texture , smell, text and graphic language. The concept of post-consumptive value as well as performative, spatial and temporal considerations are often marginalized, but offer the designer a variety of opportunities to gain experience, generate social engagement (and exercise online) and create additional value. beyond the surface. Apple could be a good example. The packaging depends on the design of the products, the ease of use and the apparent overlap and the transition between materials. Even with this significant example, we see so few examples of it elsewhere. The material is often a final highlight, an increase in graphics, not as a critical and essential part of the product or as an extension of the brand history.
Good examples would be the layered maps by A.N. Other from Socio Design or the secondary use of packaging for chaos. The mix of usefulness, material language and further use is intelligent. It involves product and packaging. The packaging itself has a voice that speaks not only materially, but also conceptually about the value of the product and references cultural stories of hidden valuables in books. Other examples would be the mechanism the Commission uses for Rimowa within the tags, and the draw for Honom by Folch. Each requires an action and, in a broader sense, a performance, a well thought-out mechanism and a revelation.
Does the packaging open like a book? Is this a visual trick that only serves to differentiate material, or does it allude to a gripping story or does it precede it? Is information released through layers over time? Is there a juxtaposition and a story in the packaging layers, in the transition from one material to another, a Russian doll with communicative and tactile experience like Bedow's work for Nunchi? This is an untapped landscape of opportunities. The banal and everyday mechanism of opening, the careful succession of information that has been reconfigured and placed in a new context to delight and tell the story. Read more texts → here.
