Across civilizations, historical periods, and geographical contexts, humans have relied on plants for various purposes. In the realms of healing and wellbeing, plants have been foraged, grown, or transformed to be eaten, swallowed or absorbed through the skin to best harness their properties. The evolution of the transformative processes of plants has made way for pharmaceutical and cosmetic artifacts that have been adopted for their practical and efficient formats and shapes (i.e., capsules, creams, sprays, etc.).
Although practical, these formats are limited by standardized packaging typologies and depend on visual communication strategies to convey their value. The current research involves product design in the development of pharmaceutical and cosmetic artifacts. Two projects were carried out in geographically different contexts in collaboration with local businesses with the objective of designing product formats that showcase and valorize local plant species. The usefulness of specific plants was central in order to define the ways of use and shapes of the resulting artifacts. Collaboration with experts involved in the transformative processes was fundamental to explore material possibilities.
The resulting artifacts, which have arrived at the prototype stage, materialize the medicinal and cosmetic properties of the plant ingredients they contain and are also less dependent on standardized packaging. In this way, product design has been involved in the development of artifacts in order to propose alternative formats and allow users to experience plant ingredients in different ways.
Paula Cermeño Leon has an MA in Product Design from ÉCAL, Switzerland. She is an industrial designer and lecturer at Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, Peru. Her work centers on the relations between design and biodiversity.
Cite This Paper
Cermeño Leon, Paula. “Retracing the Relations Between Plants and Our Wellbeing Through Product Design.” Arts Imagining Communities to Come, Guayaquil, Ecuador, 8-11 November 2021. Cumulus Association, 2022. Accessed [month, day, year].