Artificial Intelligence is transforming how brands approach packaging design and efficiency. The integration of AI offers unparalleled opportunities to gain insights into consumer behavior, streamline the design process, and ultimately, enhance the consumer experience. However, we must not forget that AI is only as good as the information it is fed and shines when leveraged as a tool guided by human experts.
How We Are Using AI
Incorporating AI into our workflow isn’t just about staying relevant, it’s about harnessing a tool that can revolutionize the way we work. Here are some of the ways we are starting to experiment with AI tools in our day-to-day work:
Idea generation and Inspiration
Using AI in our creative workflow is significantly enhancing our team’s productivity. It streamlines the idea generation phase by efficiently gathering inspiration from across the web. By entering key concepts, themes, or objectives into AI-powered platforms, our team gains access to a vast array of imagery, color schemes, typography, and layout concepts that serve as inspiration and early-stage visualization of ideas. Staff are consequently able to focus their energy on innovation, strategy, and concept refinement.
Testing
AI offers great potential by providing intelligent models and algorithms that can be used to evaluate our work. One example is predictive AI heatmapping, which allows us to analyze and forecast where consumers focus their attention during the initial 1-2 seconds of reviewing a package. This insight allows us to test how consumers read our design and informs us whether or not we’re effectively capturing consumer attention where we need it.
Copywriting
Possibly the most common application of AI by our team is copywriting. AI accelerates the content generation process by quickly summarizing complex concepts and providing initial drafts that align with our desired tone of voice. AI also helps us edit or proofread finished work. AI language models have come a long way in understanding human language. That being said, our experience suggests that such models still have a long way to go in terms of effectively tapping into human emotion.
The Human Touch
Despite its impressive capabilities, AI lacks the understanding and innovative spark of human creativity. AI is driven by logic and data, but the essence of impactful packaging design – emotion, aesthetics, and cultural resonance – remains deeply human.
We must ensure that we use AI as a tool under our direction, rather than an autonomous decision-maker. Humans must always be in the driver’s seat, using AI systems to support our goals, not replace us.
The idea of human direction in AI-driven processes is not about undermining AI’s capabilities but using its strengths in collaboration with human insight.
The role that humans play is complex:
• Realism and Relevance: Humans can gauge the feasibility of AI-generated solutions within practical contexts, evaluating if they are realistic, relevant, and implementable.
• Innovation and Creativity: Where AI follows patterns, human creativity excels in breaking them. Designers can push boundaries and propose innovative solutions where AI may default to tried and tested formulas.
• Ethical and Cultural Considerations: Humans consider ethical implications and cultural sensitivities in design decisions, navigating complex social landscapes that AI might overlook.
The future involves strategic collaboration between AI and human creativity. We must develop a thorough understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations, ensuring that its integration into the design process boosts efficiency, sustainability, and consumer engagement without diminishing the value of human intuition and creativity.
Staying abreast of emerging AI technologies and exploring their potential applications in design will help us to make informed decisions about when to leverage AI and when to rely on human expertise.