Who Designs This Stuff?--the impressive origami of modern packaging

Like many people, we purchase way too many things that come packaged in one sort of cardboard box or another. Boxes pile up and have to be recycled, since we only have need for a few to use for this and that. As a result, every so often I spend time breaking down cardboard boxes so I can fit them neatly into the trunk of my car... and sometimes I am surprised at the ingenuity of the packaging.

Most of the standard shipping boxes are held together with tape, but boxes that were designed to hold a specific product--something electronic, perhaps--are often folded into shape and can be unfolded and flattened without cutting any tape at all. (Like a pizza box.) Not only that, but sometimes the inserts are also just cleverly folded cardboard, designed to hold a particular shape of product securely during shipping.

Who comes up with this stuff? How do they do it? I imagine the packaging engineers must have a whole repertoire of standard folded box templates. Then, when assigned to make a package for some assortments of product and parts, they tweak them. Surely there's a computer program involved, too. (Maybe it measures how much cardboard different potential packaging solutions would require.)

But really I don't know anything about how they do it. I just know that a lot of ingenuity apparently went into these pieces of cardboard that I am about to recycle, and so, in appreciation, I took a few photos recently to offer as samples.

I think this one had a lid with tabs.

Box with fold-over lid with tabs.

See the attached insert on this box. I'm not sure what it held.

I wish I had taken photos of some of the more elaborate folded inserts I've seen, and also photos of the "before" stage--when they were still boxes and compartments and oddly shaped cradles for cables.

Till next post.