Packaging Design and Communication Accessibility. A Study of Access Design

The paper outlines, from the communication design perspective, the user-centred approach taken to address the packaging design area and explores the potentialities of the project of information accessibility to deliver innovation from the user’s perspective. Packaging is analysed as a ‘device for access’, supporting the relations between product and user and ensuring the correct transfer of information conveyed. Communication design enhances, in this sense, its function of ‘facilitator’, enabling access to contents (a set of data or an object) to different user groups. In this view, a research study on the communication access to the product and its use (information for interaction) is presented. This study analysed, in particular, the modalities through which packages allow the information transfer and explored the factors determining the communication access in relation to packaging informative and prescriptive functions, in order to highlight the criticalities, determine some reference parameters and develop, lastly, some guidelines for designers and enterprises. Besides the graphical dimension, the research work also considered the qualities provided by the sensory modalities of sight and touch to facilitate access to information and to the product.