Packaging Reflects Society

- Karl Fink (Graphis Packaging 3, 1977)

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"Today poetic design is based on an plethora of complex criteria; human experience, social behaviors and global issues, economic and political issues, physical and mental interaction, form, vision, and a rigorous understanding and desire of contemporary culture. Manufacturing is based on another collective group of criteria: capital investment, market share, production ease, dissemination, growth, distribution, maintenance and service, performance, quality, ecological issues and sustainability. The combination of all these issues shape our objects, informs our form, our physical space and visual culture, and our contemporary human experiences. These quantitative constructs together shape business, its' identity, its ' brand, its value. This is the business of beauty. Every business should be completely concerned with beauty - it is after all what is a collective human need.

I believe that we could be living in an entirely different world - one that is full of real contemporary inspiring objects, spaces, places, worlds, spirits and experiences. Design has been the cultural shaper of our world from the start. We have designed systems, cities, and commodities. We have addressed the world’s problems. Now design is not about solving problems, but about a rigorous beautification of our built environments. Design is about the betterment of our lives poetically, aesthetically, experientially, sensorially, and emotionally. My real desire is to see people live in the modus of our time, to participate in the contemporary world, and to release themselves from nostalgia, antiquated traditions, old rituals, kitsch and the meaningless. We should be conscious and attune with this world in this moment. If human nature is to live in the past - to change the world is to change human nature."

- From Karim Rashid's Manifesto.