Abstract:

There is great potential in utilizing packaging to educate children as well as their families on sustainability. Education does not only happen within the classroom walls. Considering the impact of advertising and packaging in daily life, in addition to the fact that children are surrounded with messages delivered by packaging onto their breakfast tables, through the effective collaboration of teachers and leading companies, children may receive holistic and earth-friendly knowledge. This knowledge has the potential to better equip children with fundamental facts or approaches to be active members of their community in protecting their environment. Within the study, literature as well as applied examples are presented, with an analysis and comparison of design features used that support educational sustainable messages. The effects of the educational aspect of packaging are discussed via the comparisons of packaging for products, ranging from clothing to personal devices such as children’s watches. In addition, the growing use and potentials of artificial intelligence, also known as AI are explored through examples of brands that effectively apply these technologies. Conclusions reflect a variety of positive paths that brands can adopt in coordination with educators and schools, such as using sustainable materials that can be reused with the necessary instructions. These include seed-infused wrapping paper and ecological "homework" or tasks that children and parents can undertake, creating awareness on the environmental impact of individual decisions and actions. The paper also presents practical strategies in terms of design and the educational aspect of packaging and AI.

With the rapid increase in the employment of e-commerce by consumers, which has taken a giant leap during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the growing awareness toward the sustaining of nature and its resources, the existent concern and the development of solutions about designing sustainable packaging has also picked up pace. The world’s leading companies have started researching better, more efficient ways of creating packaging that increases recyclability, reducing the number of layers per packaging, the carbon footprint of the company, and waste production and increases the overall sustainability, while being cost-effective. One of the emerging tools for determining the best, most efficient components and combinations in the creation of such a product is the rapidly emerging and popular implementation of AI. While some companies go so far as to make use of AI with the actual graphic design of the packaging in order to create designs that are unique to each and every customer, most companies make use of this system to search all online data, make calculations and come up with the most efficient sustainable solutions based on the information at hand; a process that is an undertaking that seems to be not humanly possible. With the use of AI technologies, all sorts of combinations are overseen and calculated to provide the most sustainability efficient solutions to packaging issues and these solutions prove more beneficial compared with solutions that are devised when AI Technologies are not implemented.

The awareness, acknowledgment and care with which companies approach the topic of sustainable packaging design and the implementation of the latest and popular technologies that will be central to the daily experiences of the individuals of Generation Alpha, born between the early 2010’s and mid 2020’s, will most likely play a part in how they will shape their actions both in their attitude towards the planet they inhabit and the way they make use of the newer technologies in order to sustain it. The paper presents possible contemporary and future routes for the connections between sustainable design, AI, and education at school as well as the home.

Keywords:

Public education, Sustainable strategies in schools, Packaging Design, Artificial Intelligence, Generation Alpha.