2. On the Shelf - Tribute to Food Packaging

Concept

Food packaging has been extensively used on commercial food products since 1800. They not only function as a preserver and container, but also play an important role in information communication. More and more direct or indirect information has been added to food packages for better communication between consumers and food industry. Information has become more and more transparent thanks to the application of packaging innovations. As the packaging methods and regulation keep updating, digital media mixed with it to give better user experiences.

Nowadays, there are so many different food products on the shelves. To find a product that suits our preference we need valid sensorial communication. More and more packages started to include sensorial profile of the product. Maybe in the future, digital aided packages will allow on-time updating evaluations of the product based on massive user feedback data.

For its great potential of development, I chose to pay a tribute to food packaging by giving an example of packaging-aided information clearance. I use human as a reflect of on-shelf products. Everyone pass-by us might be a perfect colleague or friend while it is not possible to introduce ourselves to every stranger. Sometimes we are in the same situation as a food product on the shelf. How about informatively package ourselves for clearer information communication? In this tribute I tried to make one of my daily dress into a well-labeled “human package”.

Materials & Method

One of my daily dress was used as the base of this packaging. I designed different elements corresponding to a regular food package (from display to nutrition table and some other details). Due to time limit, I only implemented few of them. I used Media Technology 2018 as my brand. And listed my interests and personal profile. The finished image is horizontally flapped and printed to heat transfer papers, which was ironed to the cloth later.

Result

The Transfer paper didn’t work very well with my cloth, so the result looks more like a broken old package.

Further improvements

The labels could be more in detailed and better designed. The translation of different elements should also go through comments and evaluations to check common agreement. Different method of transferring or different cloth materials should be tried to get an acceptable result.