Packaging Mid Sweden Award was founded by Packaging Mid Sweden, Åkroken Science Park AB, Mid Sweden University and SCA Packaging Sweden AB, to stimulate the development of packaging concepts for the future. The competition gained great interest all over Sweden and also attracted international attention, key organizer wrote in their statement. The award ceremony took place in the 1st of October at the Paper Makers Night’s banquet at the city hall of Sundsvall, Sweden.

The main prize of 3,000 euros went to Ilari Laitinen and Nikolo Kerimov, the two Finnish design students from Lahti Institute of Design, PACKLAB., for their innovative packaging concept “IISI”, with a great focus on functionality, manageability and communications.

The jury commented: “The contribution shows an aesthetically pleasing packaging solution that has great potential to facilitate human handling of packages. The proposed solution is a grip-friendly packaging, which can be opened with one hand. The winners also had insights on possible adjustments needed for mass production and presented a solution on how the packaging will be able to function throughout its value chain”

The second prize, a student prize for 1,000 euros, went to Katherine Gradzka and Anna Westelius from Gotland University.

Their packaging concept called “CAKE” has potential to be applied to many different products. The premise is that weight, materials and packaging opening affects the ease of use. The concept implies that a larger store packaging can be divided into smaller, more user-friendly table packages. The smaller and lighter triangular packaging is easy to hold and easy to handle.

More articles from the media:

[link] Packaging Mid Sweden Award 2009 (in Swedish)
[link] Packnyheter (in Swedish)
[link] Dagbladet (in Swedish)