There are several design principles that can easily be applied to our group’s company, Olay, within the beauty and personal care industry. The most identifiable one is the largely single use plastic containers and bottles that many products come in. Instead of placing products within these unsustainable packages, there should be reusable packaging. This packaging should be made from only one material to eliminate extra supply, transportation, and production costs and environmental impacts. I would suggest using aluminum because it is durable and can easily be recycled, melted into something new. Additionally, the effect of this design principle can be a cost incentive for consumers to purchase the product at first in an aluminum container then bring in the same container to refill at a dispenser in the store in order to get a product discount.
Another design principle could be an improved formula for Olay’s products that would give customers multiple benefits from one product. There are already several Olay product lines that have 7 effects in 1 container, but this should be applied to all of the items. People want to see skin improvement but with less time and energy put into their daily routines. Also, unnatural, unfamiliar ingredient should be replaced with organic, natural ingredients. This would definitely be constituted as “state of the art” design because by doing this there would no longer be harmful chemicals going into one’s skin, and these products enter sewers and wastewater treatment plants when it is washed off one’s face which is extremely detrimental to the environment and causes more work to purify water.
Olay’s packaging could be improved with experimental shaping to potentially better fit the consumers’ hand when utilizing the product. A push top versus squeeze bottle, which some products are in, can be far easier to close once the product has made one’s hands slippery, which makes it difficult to close a squeeze bottle. A large diameter of a screw off top could be shortened because the main clientele for Olay are women who usually have far smaller hands than men. This would give women with short hands a fair advantage of easily being able to open up their bottle for the first time and not have problems closing it each time after use.
A final design principle which was heavily inspired by the “Cool products” PDF would be some sort of counter on the aluminum container. This would be a positive counter that would make the consumer feel great about their choice of using reusable packaging because every time they refilled the product it would show the number of plastic containers the consumer has save by choosing this better, alternative packaging.