Future Packaging Trends

With the rapid development of science and technology, market competition has become increasingly fierce, economic and resource contradictions have become increasingly prominent, and the struggle between globalization and regionalization has never stopped. Where will the packaging industry go in the future? At present, developing packaging, protecting the environment, promoting the sustainable development of the packaging industry, and promoting the harmony between man and the natural ecological environment have become common problems faced by mankind. To solve these problems, we can consider the following aspects.

(1) Personalized design.

Globalization does not mean obliterating individuality. If the packaging all over the world is the same, it would be so boring! Modern architecture has caused the same consequence of global architecture, so it is necessary to maintain the regional characteristics of the design and reflect the individual design culture of a nation. Many packaging designs in Japan make full use of modern packaging materials and technologies, as well as national symbols and a lot of calligraphy, with strong regional characteristics (Figure 1-53). Of course, the packaging of each company or brand must not only avoid homogeneity, but also highlight individualization and differentiation (Figure 1-54). Even the needs of everyone must be considered. The current popular private custom design is actually a manifestation of meeting the needs of individual design.

(2) Humanized design.

The design takes people as the main body, re-examining, re-constructing and re-defining people’s thoughts, emotions, personalities and functional needs to make them more humane. The aforementioned “user experience” design is actually a humanized design. For consumers, the humanized packaging is more friendly and cordial (Figure 1-55).

(3) Green design to protect the environment.

In the 1960s and 1970s, people realized that modern production methods heavily consumed natural resources, caused pollution and waste, and were the same, lacking regional and national characteristics. In terms of environmental protection design, the packaging industry has set off a trend of “3R1D design“, namely the four major standards of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and Degradable”. Reduce (light packaging) requires the elimination of over-packing. Mineral water reduces the thickness of plastic bottles and reduces pollution (Figure 1-56). In terms of Reuse (packaging container recycling), beer packaging has done a good job, which can greatly save resources. Recycle (recycling of packaging materials) requires recycling of resources, such as recycling waste paper to produce recycled paper. Degradable (using degradable materials) is also an effective environmental protection method. Because white pollution cannot be degraded, it is necessary to consider the use of degradable materials when designing packaging.

(4) Packaging design for e-commerce.

People are becoming more and more accustomed to online shopping, and designing sales packaging for e-commerce will surely become a new topic for designers in the 21st century. E-commerce brings animal flow, and logistics packaging also brings many problems, such as serious resource consumption and pollution, inconvenient packaging and unpacking, and damage to items during transportation. Packaging materials, technical costs, and sales packaging all need to be further improved.

(5) The design of anti-counterfeiting packaging.

How to prevent counterfeiting has become a major problem in the modern high-end packaging industry. The combination of packaging design innovation and printing technology that integrates high-tech achievements will be another direction for future packaging development.

(6) The design of smart packaging.

Smart packaging mainly refers to the use of QR codes, AR augmented reality (image recognition), invisible watermarks, digital watermarks, dot matrix technology, RFID electronic tags, etc. on product packaging through cloud computing, mobile Internet, Internet of Things and other technologies. The information of the company is collected to build a smart IoT big data platform to realize product anti-counterfeiting, traceability, mobile marketing, brand promotion and other functions. Artificial intelligence in the packaging industry is mainly reflected in three aspects: First, intelligent robots replace labour. Many low-skilled production workers have been replaced by robots. In the future, more workers will be eliminated, and a large number of workers in traditional packaging production plants will also Being eliminated by robots, even couriers will be replaced by drones; second, intelligent packaging materials, such as food quality information can be seen through the colour of the packaging; third, the realization of “unmanned store” is mostly related to smart packaging (Figure 1-57).