7 scariest COVID impacts on packaging

Everything was rushing up to speed in the world pretty much in normalcy when the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic arrived and took the world by storm in 2020. This is very much different from the great depression or the 2008 recession - it is a one of a kind catastrophe humanity has had to face since a long time - predicted well in advance by Bill Gates.

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Whereas on a national level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown forcing all industries to shut shop and over 1.3 billion people to stay put in their homes - there are bound to be larger and perhaps, unseen, impacts that we need to be aware of.
If we talk about the packaging sector, here are 7 impacts on the industry that we need to be aware of.

Self folding structures: the future of packaging?

Haruki Nakamura, the origami artist and paper engineer from Japan, is perhaps one of the most under rated contributors in the field today. His works are amazing, especially how he brings 2 dimensional structures into 3D, and 3D ones alive by adding the component of time to them. You can check out his work on YouTube.

What is more intriguing, is when we take this conversation towards further automation as explained below. This has far reaching implications on interactive packaging- on creating a whole experience out of how the user interacts with the paper packaging. This is exactly what the next level is - experiential economy.


If you have a look here, you can check out the amazing work done by MIT Media labs. Using really simple base materials such as paper, plastics, and fabrics, the designers adequately stitched certain folds and used inflation and resulting pneumatic pressure for the material to automatically fold over itself - resulting in a unique 'alive' origami structure.
Their developed software creates a sort of a key-line that dictates the degree of bending, the geometry etc. that the 2D structure will morph into.

Speaking of work done in the packaging sector by MIT Media labs, another unique publication (follow link here) is where they have introduced wireless sensors (which are of-course really cheap and consume very less power) in labels to identify how the consumer behaves around the product. For example:  a children's milk bottle can play a soothing baby music whenever it is picked up, and whenever the quantity is reaching lower than specified  it can send an order automatically for refill.