ABSTRACT
The packaging that we encounter every day is made of a range of materials – paper, plastics, metal, ceramic, glass – and its design also involves some ‘symbolic’ content – text, shape, colour, pattern. As we saw in Chapter 1, both are important for the purposes that packaging is designed to fulfil and both are significant in re-use. Although it is convenient to consider these elements separately, and this chapter will emphasize the materials used in packaging rather than the symbolic consequences of packaging designs, this is an artificial distinction. Understanding packaging and its re-use in everyday life to promote its re-use through design means fully exploring the relationships between its physical and symbolic aspects – indeed, as we will shortly see, materials themselves have symbolic properties.
