Design for ability: a new era of universal packaging: as the population ages, corrugated and folding carton converters can win customer loyalty and new
Paperboard Packaging

A couple years ago, Dr. Glen House, an M.D. from Colorado Springs, Colo., and Muffy Davis, a paralympian from Salt Lake City, climbed 13.5 miles to the summit of Pikes Peak. That would be quite an accomplishment for anyone. House and Davis conquered this mountain in wheelchairs.

This isn't a story about mountain climbing. It's about the kind of heroic packaging design efforts that went into delivering the wheelchairs to these amazing people. It's the kind of packaging that will take converters out of the commodities business and put them in the same league as their customers whose products make life easier for people like these mountain climbers.

The story behind the wheelchair packaging is about universal design. In the late 90s, a group of architects, product designers, engineers and environmental design researchers collaborated, under the auspices of N.C. State University, to establish principles of universal design for manufacturers to follow (see sidebar, Elements of Universal Design, p. 16).

In a nutshell, universal design is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design.