Saturday, March 5, 2011

Task 2a - Recycling

This is a response to the videos created by Duales System Seutschland (DSD) entitled Giving Packaging a New Life. They can be seen below.

These videos are nothing new, they don't provide any information that even a poorly informed designed shouldn't know already other than some interesting statistics and processes. Frankly this is not particularly riveting stuff. However, it forces one to consider the immense quantity of packaging that is discarded globally. This brings to the spotlight that perhaps the answer is not to focus on devising better and more economical ways of recycling. Rather we need to embed a sense of obligation in the designer to design packaging that reduces materials and enables easy recycling. Although there is a major roadblock. The problem is that it starts with the consumer whose expectations for everything to come with an unnecessarily "fancy" packaging which is really an ill allocation of resources.

So perhaps there needs to be a reprogram of the consumer. Where the concept of what is good packaging and what is bad packaging will be altered. Hence less extravagant/wasteful packaging will be perceived as superior and in fact favoured by the consumer.

Perhaps we should just blame marketing? I'm not sure...?








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