Everyday Musings > Packed

I went to a mall recently to pick up a bottle of perfume. Saw many, some with delightful packaging that turned me dizzy except that the perfume had me nauseous and rushing for coffee beans. I wished then that I could opt to buy just the packaging and not the perfume, like collecting wrapping paper without the intention of ever having it ripped off a gift.

Design. The future of the world seems increasingly hinged on it. As societies grew larger and drifted to other settlements, Packaging was created to keep products fresh for longer, for it to be easily transportable, and in a growing market, to establish a brand. With time, products, however, are turning homogenous. And the role of packaging is now giving people the reason to pick this over that. In a row of a hundred packs of chips, we’d reach for the one most appetising, or most familiar. When products start having shorter life cycles and there are less and less ‘good old familiar’ varieties to pick from, or products travel across nations and no one is sure of how good or bad an alien brand is, design takes centre stage and makes our choices for us. We base earnestness, ‘traditionalness’, fun, taste, authenticity on the proportions and colours and typeface on the pack. This most times subconsciously, and increasingly consciously, dictates what makes it to the shopping cart.

This movement towards conscious recognition of packaging versus it being a subconscious stimulus is one that possibly affects our social character as well. The outer form is becoming more and more important as people find less and less time to invest in getting to know people the old fashioned way. Relationships are shorter and quicker. As are loyalties. Thus what you wear and how you look is the best way to pick this over that. Be it in friendship, love or jobs. I once heard my friend say that his boss decides to hire someone in the first five seconds of seeing that person, the rest of the interview is just a formality. And everyone’s in a rush to package themselves as best as they can.

This charm for window dressing, though, is stoked by talent and opportunity. The rising amount of people employed and enrolled by design is mind boggling. The internet and the real world have unending possibilities for the designer and its muse. And like agriculture, industrialisation, genetics and information technology, this revolution is spreading faster and deeper into everyone’s psyche.

Each one of us are walking design statements, each speaking our own visual language. We walk around the world, our shopping carts in mind, picking this one and that one based on what we see, touch, smell, feel. Sometimes, the packaging is the right pick, sometimes it’s not to expectations and sometimes way past expiry date. And like the ones who walk the malls and thumb the glossies, we're experiencing shopper's anxiety too.

The who-what-which is our pick, our choice, based on our design preferences, but as design gets sharper, slicker and more individualistic, our choices get that much finer. Leaving no room for something to grow on us and surprise us. The price seems too high to pay for a trial and throw. Or is it?