Eric O’Toole
Pratt Institute, MS Packaging, Identities, and Systems Fall 2021
This exercise was designed for first year, first semester graduate students. Each student was provided with a bottle, a container, a clamshell and other complex, but mundane packages. These were all common objects, void of any applied graphics. The students were brought through a process of ‘slow looking’, for two hours of deep physical and visual explore the objects. While engaged in this process, they wrote down their observations and discussed them afterwards.
In this exercise, students are encouraged to practice close observation and deductive reasoning, problem solving and assessment. Essentially, the students were reverse engineering the decision-making process the original design team may have engaged in.
