Project-led Education in Packaging Development and Management

As an implicit subset of industrial design engineering, packaging development and management thereof has long been a changeling, because product and packaging development are usually regarded in a similar manner. At the same time, there is a clear difference between packaging design and product design. The packaging explicitly serves the content and, therefore, in most cases, packaging is of low economic value. For this reason, new packaging design is all too often subject to standard or existing packaging solutions. Besides this, packaging development has specific requirements, because it has to preserve and protect its content, which gives many technical requirements. Other important requirements are based on legislation, market acceptance, the environmental impact and usability.This implies that education in packaging development cannot be a carbon copy of the education in product development. Often, even more fields of expertise are involved, while having to meet all restrictions related to developing feasible and realistic packages in a shorter time-frame.This publication describes how project-led education is employed in an educational approach that allows students to adequately address the development of content-packaging combinations in a structured, effective and efficient manner. With this, the development efforts spent on product and packaging can become more in balance, not only doing justice to the separate life cycles of the two, but especially to the benefit of the combined life cycle of the content-packaging combination