Topic outline


  • Welcome to Pack-Age 2021!

    Pack-Age is an intensive and extensive packaging design project minor at Aalto University uniting design, business, and engineering, to sustainability and project-based learning. It is a platform for exploration. Students work in transdisciplinary teams with real projects from the industry. Creative problem-solving is a key concept of the course, where students’ backgrounds become the core resource for creative teamwork.

    By collaborating with different schools, Pack-Age offers a holistic understanding and an innovative packaging design approach including various perspectives to strategy, branding, production, consumer retail, and user experience.

    Visit our website to learn more about our approach and previous projects: https://pack-age.aalto.fi/about/

    Zoom-link for the course
    https://aalto.zoom.us/j/62848580003

    This is the link to the wonder.me platform and Pack-Age room and you can also meet there with your team on your own time.
    https://app.wonder.me/?spaceId=61d6680c-ec9f-415e-bb25-f65e6cbcb954
    password: sparring21


    • Return your background research & insight presentation here by 4. October.

      It should include a summary of what you did by using both primary and secondary research that you found relevant for the project. Explain how you have analyzed and grouped the findings and what insight and opportunities have you identified for your design project.

      Eeva gave many good suggestions for research, but  try to include at least some information on users & use-context, market & retail space, product-specific solutions, material and technological opportunities, the trends that you can connect to your case

      Include also the one interesting packaging design example that exited the team and that you have now benchmarked, and analyzed (reverse-engineered). It does not have to be related to your project, but please explain why you selected it and what we can learn from it. (this bit should not be more than 5 slides)

      You have 20 minutes to present all this on October 5 to the class. We have invited also your clients and we have an opportunity to discuss with them what we have learned. It is a perfect time to discuss that we are on the right track and also verify that we have understood the project correctly and what we will do next.
      It can be a good idea to include on the last page an outline of your next steps or a rough "project plan", which clarifies what you will be doing next to help the discussion and set the right expectations also for clients.

      Team Flower will be presenting at 9:15
      Team Berry will be presenting at 10:00
      Team Spice will be presenting at 11:00

      But all teams will be in class at the same time so we are sharing our findings and also commenting each others work and collectively learning. We should have enough time for good discussions :)

    • Return your interim critique presentations here by 4.11.

    • Teachers will have access to presentations and they are used also for grading.

      Files should be commonly used formats, like pdf and maximum file size is 400 MB.

    • Once you have presented and also returned all your presentations, reports and such materials you are officially done with Pack-Age 2021! Congratulations, and I hope you have enjoyed the ride and the learning experience as much as I have.

      Please also remember to return any  books or other materials you might have borrowed from Markus.

      For the future Pack-agers it is also interesting to learn about your experience. If you want you can help us with spreading the good word out by sharing a short comment in which you describe your experience with Pack-Age 2021. We can then use this as a short quote or testimonial to market the course for potential future students in different schools.
      We will also ask some similar comments about the experience from clients and teachers. Maybe we can even include some on the website once we have or allowed to update our projects there.

      Participating in this is not compulsory, but we do value your effort if you can :)

    • As you might remember from the course intro, teamwork is also one area of assessment.

      As you all have now almost completed the course, please take a moment to reflect on your process and give your teammates a grade on teamwork. Reflect on how the project went as a whole and how you were able to support each other in the team, contribute to the project, share responsibilities and workload.

      Submit a text file (word or similar) with the three other person names in your team and give a grade from 1-5 for each. You can write a short explanation after the grade if you wish.

      Your grade for team working will be the average of what your 3 peers have given you.
      Teamworking has a small effect and counts as 20% of your overall final grade for the course.