Ritualistic Food Packaging
Spring 2021
4.041 Advanced Product Design: Snack Edition
My project hopes to design and fabricate a packaging for snacks that captures the subtle timing that intuitively delays gratification in a satisfying way through visual cues for rituals. The world today is over-dependent on instant gratification, and people often eat food too quickly or distractedly which is unhealthy.
Since opening packaging is the start to eating every snack, the adjusted packaging creates a period of time for the snacker to slow down, focus, and be in the moment before eating, which enhances the snacking experience and builds snacking rituals that delays gratification naturally.
Key concept: Playful packaging that can be applied to box-like snacks that encourages sharing
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Process:
Created a smiley face, sad face duality prototype as an initial test for the slider. Looking for inspiration in a book about pop-ups, I found this simple pull transition between two images and thought it had potential to be a satisfying fidget toy. Applying it to a box form, I realized I could use the pull tab as the closing mechanism for a box to encourage users to intuitively learn how to use the slider.
I later expanded on this to allow users to open the snack on both sides, one side small for individual snacking, one side big for sharing (with corresponding imagery)
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How it works:
Cut on the thick lines in the diagram below and weave to assemble, attach the shell to a base box.
Open by pulling on the perforated section, pull and tuck to close.
Starts off with nerds logo, once user opens it slides between the snacking mode and the logo.
Key concept: Packaging that encourages you to take the time to sort snacks by color, a task that I find to be grounding and calming when eating snacks like M&Ms and Skittles. Although color sorting may seem like a tedious task to the average individual, I wanted the packaging to gamify the sorting process to encourage more people to delay gratification while keeping people occupied and engaged for longer periods of time before eating.
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Process:
By creating a sleeve with a pull tab weaving in and out of the plastic material, I can easily create an accordion pattern from a plastic bag material. By attaching this sleeve on both ends of an unfolded bag, I used this accordion shape to create ridges (lanes) that are perfect for color sorting.
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The biggest change is the shift towards a trifold packaging, in an attempt to make the packaging resealable (gray regions are lined with resealable tape) and easy to pack up for a snack later in the day.
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Above pictures are a prototype and instruction sheet that would be printed on the inside of the packaging.
Below is a video demo of how it works!
Key concept: A snack that automatically closes the packaging when you're not interacting with it, a playful way to encourage people to think twice before reaching for another snack
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How it works:
Using a rubber band to connect the lid and base, this hack forces the user has to constantly interact with/hold the packaging for it to not close immediately. Because I couldn't get my hands on an actual box to show the interaction on an existing product, I made a simple proof of concept box + connection diagram, along with a rendering in Blender to show the connection and snap back process.
