By Dhiya Gerber
Publication Date: 2026-04-21 14:00:00
Historically, packaging has relied on plastic to do a lot of structural and functional work. It appears as foam inserts, shrink wrap, laminate coatings, adhesive tapes, films, sleeves, and bags, each solving for a different physical vulnerability. Try to replace it and new problems show up – moisture ingress, surface abrasion, electrostatic buildup, particulate contamination, or mechanical shock.
“Fundamentally,” Taylor Clow, one of the senior designers on Microsoft’s Packaging and Content (PAC) team, told me, “Plastic is not paper and paper is not plastic. They do not behave the same way.”
Finding a solution required looking at what plastic was solving for in the first place. “We had to stop and say,” Clow recalled, “what is causing the issue, and how can we solve that, not just put a band aid everywhere.”
The teams had to figure out how to solve for everything, from moisture to impact, ensuring any solution worked for players,…
