Browse through any design monograph or website and you’re bound to come across such terms as “tinkering,” “iterative thinking,” and “prototyping.” In the design world, it’s understood that great products tend to emerge from an inquisitive, let’s-see-what-happens attitude.

Ideo, the international design and ideas firm, knows the value of experimenting and so has set up an internal project, Designs On, to cultivate an open and active design culture.

Since 2008, Ideo has produced limited-edition runs of semi-annual themed pamphlets (they’re on their fifth iteration) that spotlight 15+ takes on loaded topics such as food, birth, and global warming. This year’s motif, packaging, may seem less urgent. But it’s a “potent theme,” underscores Ideo, with consequences uniquely its own.

The publications take on themes that are meme-like in length–simultaneously concise and open-ended. The ambiguity is intentional, says Designs On Director Blaise Bertrand. “What we know as designers,” he tells Co. Design, “is that as the world becomes more complex, we have to deal with that complexity and distill it into messages that explain things in simple, yet sensitive, ways.” The purpose of the project, he explains, is to visualize that ambiguity in a tangible way that can affect people’s lives.





To a large extent, packaging mediates our experience with the world, probably more than any of us realize. This year’s charrette elicited a vast array of ideas that explore how packaging design can assume more participatory or guiding roles in a product’s or object’s consumption. Bertrand and co. guided teams to develop ideas around two categories: Relationships and Tensions.

“Relationships” targets designs that concern themselves with how a user interfaces with a product as well as how that product reflexively imparts impressions of places, things, and sensations back to the user. “City Scent,” for example, constructs a tabletop skyline of souvenirs that store “olfactory profiles” of different metropoles. “Rice” gives the staple crop its due and champions it with universalist and easy-to-carry packaging. “Hygiene” is an elaborate container that conceals bulk purchases of toilet paper rolls.

Storytelling and humor are pillars of the experiment.

“Tensions” targets the opposite. It includes concepts that identify a disconnect between the user, the object, and their material context. These designs manifest points of decay or waste–and then locate the consumer’s role in that process. “Chopsticks” very literally puts a high price on the resources expended to manufacture the globe’s supply of disposable wooden chopsticks. “Mr. Carcass” accommodates the queasy cook who’d prefer to handle freshly butchered meat with gloved hands. “Light My Ire” does the opposite: It makes it nearly impossible for a smoker to indulge in his or her “nasty habit.”