Understanding packaging complexity: Functions, meanings, and relationships

Packaging is one of the most pervasive artefacts of contemporary life, mediating relations between products, brands, users, and sociotechnical systems. More than a container, it operates simultaneously as a functional prosthesis and a communicative device, guiding practices of use, circulation, and interpretation. Its functions range from protection and preservation to persuasion, identity construction, and systemic coordination across material, digital, and symbolic domains. Semiotic and operational dimensions are intertwined: packaging encodes gestures, conveys narratives, and shapes user experience, while technological innovations extend its role as an interactive interface. At the same time, it is embedded in distributed project chains and overlapping ecologies that include material, social, economic, and cultural contexts, which highlights its relational and systemic nature. Framing packaging in this way reveals both its complexity and the responsibilities it entails, positioning design as an anticipatory and collaborative practice oriented towards circularity and regenerative processes.