Gift Look nominated for the highest achievement at the Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2019
Gift Look from the packaging category and designed by Panasonic Corporation from Japan has been nominated for the highest achievement at the Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2019 – the “Red Dot: Luminary”. The top accolade serves as inspiration and example. The design concept Gift Look adapts to various product shapes, ensuring maximum utilisation of space. Instead of cardboard, Gift Look is made from soft recycled plastic, which allows the packaging to be reused many more times than a typical shipping card-box. An interview with the designers Haruka Takematsu and Daisuke Takematsu.
What was your goal when you designed your award-winning design concept?
We wanted consumables to be sustainable, so we aimed to design something simple and emotional. It was important to have an honest design that could be comfortably understood by users.
What inspires you?
We found inspiration in our daily life. From just walking around the streets or staying at home, we can empathise with nature, science, arts and architecture. By focusing on our lives, we can find many things to change – even small things can be made better.
What are the challenges in your everyday work?
These days many products are well made and cheap. It’s a challenge for us to make a product or service that will also satisfy these requirements for people.
What do you see as being the biggest challenges in your industry at present?
We need to provide people with user experiences that enrich our daily life instead of focusing on having many functions or features.
Panasonic is known for its technology and consumer appliances. Why would the design team explores packaging innovations?
Since its founding in 1918, Panasonic has been providing home appliances, housing and services for 100 years. All of the products are created based on the founder's faith that people's lives and societies will be better. Among them, I think that the package is the best touch point with the user. We felt that the purpose of creating products should make society better, thus innovative technology was not needed in this instance.
Will this new packaging method become a reality for Panasonic in the near future?
We want to make it happen as soon as possible, but in order to do so, it is essential to collaborate with distribution companies, e-commerce companies and factories. We are currently looking for partners to collaborate together around the world.
Do you look forward to coming to the award ceremony in Singapore?
Yes, we are looking forward to meet designers from all over the world.
Winners to be honoured during the award ceremony in Singapore
Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2019 winners will be announced on the 25 September. Winning designers will be flying in from all over the world to receive their award on stage at the award ceremony. The recipient of the highest achievement in the award, the Red Dot: Luminary, will also be revealed on stage, ushering a high note in honouring 2019’s best.