Sustainable Materials Presentation

MaterialsPresentation

Oct 5

Written By Katelan Cunningham

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ART DIRECTOR • DESIGNER • RESEARCHER

Opportunity

Guacamole Airplane is a design studio that’s focused on sustainable packaging. One of my first projects with them was redesigning the Material Review presentation that they show to clients. Materials dictate a lot about how packaging is engineered and designed, so this presentation comes before any in-depth design work. The goal of the presentation is to guide clients through many sustainability grey areas, and empower them with enough information to choose the best materials to meet their goals.

Execution

Choosing more sustainable materials means understanding their impact and implications throughout the entire supply chain. Supply chains are complex — none of it is cut-and-dry. On the contrary, choosing materials is all about navigating nuance and balancing tradeoffs.

This redesign started in spreadsheets. By refining the back end data, I could get a complete picture of all the information and start to parse it out. Not only that, it was much easier to scale the presentation when working from an up-to-date material database.

To navigate grey area, I start with comparison and context. For comparison, each material section starts with tables comparing similar attributes of all the material options in one place. Then, on each material’s spotlight slide, there was space for context.

To avoid late-stage bottlenecks, each spotlight slide addressed common concerns and questions for each client stakeholder: designers, customer experience team, operations, and finance. In addition to the end-of-life options listed on each spotlight page, there is an entire End-of-life section dedicated to feasibility based on historical recovery rates.

Process

After collecting years of material information, there are bound to be some redundancies. I gathered and organized the specs and data to have a reputable base of information to work from.
With data and specs in place, it was time to start digesting information like for like. How does one material look or feel different from another? How is it best disposed? Is the ideal disposal method accessible to most customers?
I grouped each of these material attributes into categories: material, manufacturing, end-of-life. At the beginning of each section, information is grouped by these categories with tables to compare one material to another.
Each material has its own spotlight slide which leaves us space to add more context. This is the place for all the ifs, ands, and buts. In addition to a complete specs panel, we contextualize the pros and cons that are hidden between the lines of the specs. Each spotlight slide is followed with a gallery to show the material in its different forms and textures, with details about customization capabilities.
More and more, consumers want to do the right thing for their packaging and do the best they can to divert it from landfill. But even with the best of intentions, access to composting and recycling varies widely from city to city. The end-of-life section in the presentation provides a feasibility big picture so that clients can look through the lens of their customers around the world.