Iggesund Paperboard, Sweden, is working via the U.S. crowdsourcing company, Crowdspring, to challenge the world’s designers to improve existing consumer packaging.

"Every day we all see examples of packaging that could be improved by a better choice of materials or a better design," explains Staffan Sjöberg, who is in charge of the project at Iggesund Paperboard. "Now we’re giving designers all over the world the chance to contribute their ideas on how to replace packaging made of glass, plastic, or metal with solutions that use paperboard."

Sjöberg stresses that Iggesund is not looking for inexpensive ideas that can be put into commercial use. Instead, the aim is to get a picture of how global designers as a collective group believe they can steer packaging development in a more sustainable direction.

"We will not claim any commercial rights to the ideas that come in," Sjöberg said. "We’re just interested in getting a snapshot of how designers believe they can improve the packaging they see in the shops they visit on a daily basis. We want to publish the ideas and maybe reproduce some of them in physical form, but we are not interested in exploiting them commercially."

For Crowdspring, the collaboration with Iggesund Paperboard is an unusual project. Normally, the online marketplace’s services are used when someone wants either a number of inexpensive design proposals or a wide range of ideas.