Advanced Design for packaging transitions: Responsibilities, roles, and tools

Packaging today is situated within a context of multiple, interrelated crises that expose the fragility of production and consumption systems and call for transformative approaches. In this scenario, Advanced Design emerges as a systemic and anticipatory practice able to integrate knowledge domains, mediate between material and immaterial dimensions, and foster responsible innovation. Beyond technical or communicative functions, packaging design becomes an ethical and strategic infrastructure for socio-ecological transformation. Concepts such as Design Endless Responsibility and Transitional Industrial Designer highlight how design can act as a driver of change, orchestrating transitions that go beyond efficiency and sustainability to embrace circularity and regeneration. Methods and tools, from observatories to guidelines and co-creation platforms, acquire strategic significance as anticipatory devices that structure conditions for innovation. Through this lens, packaging becomes a laboratory of transition, a field where design anticipates impacts, connects actors, and generates new forms of value.