A Research On The Two Leaps Of Design Of Packaging Added Value

With the development of society and advancement of technology, packaging, which is closely related to people’s life, is constantly changing. Ranging from green ecological packaging to smart packaging, from interactive packaging to emotional packaging, these new design ideologies and technologies have been rapidly applied to packaging area in recent years. What has been brought with are not just changes of packaging itself, but innovation of added value as well. Simultaneously, a historical law that packaging develops with society is featured. Faced with the Internet era, new technologies, market environment and consumption demands inevitably breeds new ways to design packaging added value.This paper illustrates the concept, exiting forms and growing process of packaging added value. Based on the correlations among packaging, products and people, combining commodity economy and law of value, the development of packaging added value is divided into four stages: product homogeneity stage, consciousness embryo stage, brand service stage and function expanding stage. During these four stages, the existing forms of added value has been transformed twice.The first leap of the design of packaging added value has altered the traditional way of packaging and design, in which the decoration technology is stressed. Instead, attention has been paid to the ecological added value and functional added value of packaging. The leap has included two main categories: green packaging and derivative functional packaging. It is a transformed way of added value based upon optimizing the packaging itself. On the other hand, the second leap concerns about the carrier of packaging added value, shifting from packaging entity to nonphysical virtual media, besides, functional and service added value are achieved via virtual displacement and internet connection. The transformation is determined by various factors, such as objective market, subjective demands and technological maturity in the Internet era. As a result, the discipline and approach of packaging design have to make changes accordingly. In this era of Internet, changes of social cooperation relations and ties among people, packaging and society lead to three trends during the design and packaging process: simultaneous design of packaging entity and virtual packaging, separation between conventional packaging and online shopping packaging, and connection and integration of packaging and smart terminal.The nonphysical shift of added value carrier brought by the second leap urges the connection between packaging and functional and service added value through information technologies. In this way, the problem of product usage can be solved. In addition, richer experiences can be provided. As far as the designer of packaging is concerned, he or she has to have a good knowledge of theoretical methods of Design Science as well as the theory of Consumer Behavior. He or she also needs to master internet knowledge and technologies, which is obviously a new kind of reform.