The photo below is the top of two single-serve containers of Hunt’s Lemon Meringue Pie flavored pudding. It’s hard to make out, due to the creases in the label, but there is an asterisk beside the word “Milk” in the claim “Made with Real Nonfat Milk”. The text that asterisk refers to, I have circled.
All flavors except lemon & lemon meringue pie contain milk.
Made with real milk, except when it’s not.
Here’s an example of user-centered packaging design. Burger King’s french fry containers are specifically designed to sit within a car’s cup holders. Rather than the typical wide and thin package, this one has a much squarer bottom. It’s on a little smaller in diameter than their beverage cups. They have considered how their product will be used and designed the packaging to better support that use.
Cup of Fries
There’s an elaborate vending machine in the building at which I’m working this week. Rather than dropping cans or bottles down through a slot, the machine employs a motorized arm. The arm first travels along a horizontal track to the column in which the desired bottle resides, and then another motor moves the “hand” vertically up the arm to the correct row. It grabs the bottle and carries it back down to the lower right corner of the machine where it is handed off to another motorized holder that hinges out of the machine, allowing you to retrieve the bottle. The advantage of such a mechanism is that it can purvey large, glass bottles that a standard soda machine could not.
Unfortunately, nobody considered the fact that the labels on the bottles were not designed with a vending machine in mind. The bottles have a front and a back. Only the front of the label tells you what is in the bottle. The majority of the bottles were not facing forwards, so while I could tell the difference between Snapple and Nantucket Nectar, the actual flavors were a mystery.
I was hoping to get a sweet ice tea. I ended up with apple juice.
Easy Open Tab
I finished a bottle of shower soap. This one happened to be Zest Energizing Effects Body Wash. It’s one of those bottles that has been designed with a unique, curvaceous shape. It was also designed to stand on its lid, allowing the soap to drain down to the opening as it empties.
It is, of course, made of plastic, and the first thing I do when I empty a plastic bottle is look for the recycling icon so that I can decide whether to toss it in the wastebasket in the bathroom or to set it aside to take downstairs to the recycling bin.
On most bottles, that icon can be found on the bottom. I first looked on the top of this bottle, as you might say it is designed in reverse. The brand mark was there, embossed into the plastic, but no triangular arrows. I then looked at the lid. Nothing. I scanned the shrink-wrap label that covered the rest of the bottles surface. No, it hadn’t been printed on the label. I was about to give up when my wife grabbed it an unscrewed the lid. Sure enough, there it was embossed on the neck—a number two. I can recycle it, but I almost sent it to landfill.
Green Design needs to include more than just the materials and construction of products. The product should communicate to the user about its life cycle so that the user may determine, with minimal effort, what is to be done with it. Otherwise, all the careful design will be for nought.
