8. ANGOSTURA BITTERS
No, there wasn’t a mistake
at the labelling factory,
Angostura intentionally makes
its bitters labels too big. The
Trinidad-based company puts it
down to a “laid-back Caribbean
attitude” – legend has it that
the person ordering the bottles
didn’t think to communicate
with the person in charge of
the labels.
McDONALD’S HAPPY MEAL
Few packaging designs are
more synonymous with a brand
than McDonald’s Happy Meal
box. Not that kids needed
another reason to eat junk
food, savvy marketers from
the US chain decided in the
late-1970s to tempt children to
eat their calorific meals with a
toy – something which is still
working well for the brand to
this day.
Iconicpackaging-it’swhatisoutsidethatcounts
Whether it’s clever marketing or an ingenious solution for everyday problems, some product designs have become cultural icons, celebrated in packaging’s hall of fame
HEINZ TOMATO KETCHUP
One of the most recognisable
products to grace our kitchen
cupboards. People have been
struggling to get that last bit
of sauce out since 1890, yet
Heinz ketchup is still a must for
meal times the world over, with
650 million bottles sold every
year. Despite its squeezy – and
some would say more practical
– successor, a satisfying slap on
the bottom of the original glass
bottle will always be fondly
remembered.
MILK CARTON
Toymaker John Van Wormer
got the idea for the first “paper
bottle” after smashing a glass
milk bottle one morning, and
took out a patent in 1915 for
the Pure-Pak flat-top carton,
though it took him more than
ten years to perfect a machine
capable of manufacturing on
a large scale. Erik Wallenberg
of Tetra Pak fame was credited
with using less paper and an
airtight seal for his tetrahedron
design in 1944.
PACKAGE SAVER
Carmela Vitale is not a house-
hold name, though her 1985
invention of the “package saver”
is something everyone can be
thankful for – the tiny plastic
tripod has saved the world from
squashed takeaway pizzas.
WINE BOX
Advertised as a convenient and
economical alternative to bot-
tles, bag-in-box wine is having
somewhat of a renaissance.
Comprised of a (unappetising)
plastic bladder and air-tight
valve inside a corrugated card
container, box wine keeps fresh
for up to six weeks, and reduc-
es both packaging waste and
carbon emissions compared
with glass bottles.
RING PULL
Credited as the reason behind
a rapid surge in the soft drinks
market in the 1960s, Ermal
Cleon Fraze from Ohio invented
the first detachable ring pull
in 1962, saving consumers the
need to take a “church key”
or can piercer wherever they
went. It wasn’t until 1975, when
Daniel Cudzik was granted a
patent for “stay-tabs” similar
to the ones we know today,
that the environmental impact
of discarded pull tops was
addressed.
COCA-COLA
Despite going through many
redesigns over the years, the
classic Coca-Cola “contour”
bottle created in 1916 is the one
we all associate with the fizzy
stuff. Renowned as a cultural
icon, with its fluted lines to
resemble a cocoa pod, and its
distinctive, embossed script
logo, the bottle definitely fits
the original designer’s brief to
“develop a container recog-
nisable even if broken on the
ground or touched in the dark”.
MARMITE
Both loved and hated, but
recognised by all. Invented
by German scientist Justus
Von Liebig in the 19th century
(before it was even called
Marmite), the “food extract”
was originally supplied in a
marmite – the French term
for a crockery casserole dish
notable for its pot-belly shape
– which inspired the bulbous jar
that we all know today.
QUALITY STREET
First produced in West York-
shire in the 1930s, the Quality
Street collection tin goes hand
in hand with family gatherings
and is found on many a coffee
table at Christmas – cracking
open a tin can bring back a
nostalgic whiff of cellophane
and chocolate in an instant.
CAMPBELL’S SOUP
The Campbell’s red-and-
white condensed soup can is
undeniably iconic, though its
fame cannot be attributable to
designers at the Campbell Soup
Company. Andy Warhol turned
this basic aluminium can into
an instant cultural sensation
in his pop art piece in 1962,
making a statement about
American popular culture and
consumerism, and at the same
preserving Campbell’s place in
packaging history.
HINGED CIGARETTE PACK
The hinge-lid hard cigarette
pack, created in the 1950s by
Desmond Molins, was a major
step forward for the tobacco
industry as previous soft packs
were easily damaged. Used in
1954 to relaunch the Marlboro
brand, Molins PLC credits the
invention with an instantaneous
50-fold increase in sales for
owner Philip Morris Interna-
tional, though designer Frank
Gianninoto’s bold red-and-
white labelling redesign may
have also had something to do
with it.
CHANEL NO 5
The synonymous Chanel No
5 bottle has stood the test of
time – neither the packaging
nor the scent has changed
much since the 1920s. Designed
to resemble a whisky decanter,
creator Coco Chanel envi-
sioned the bottle to be one of
“exquisite, expensive, delicate
glass”, and it instantly became
a cultural artefact, celebrated
by Andy Warhol in the 1980s.
Its popularity hasn’t faltered
since – it’s still the world’s
best-selling perfume with one
bottle sold every 30 seconds.
TOBLERONE
A seemingly permanent
feature of duty-free shopping,
the triangular prism-shaped
Toblerone box was not actually
inspired by the Swiss Alps’
Matterhorn as most would
assume. In fact, the company
says creator Theodor Tobler
modelled the original design
107 years ago on “something
sexier” – dancers at the Folies
Bergère in Paris who formed a
pyramid at the end of a show.
KFC BARGAIN BUCKET
A simple yet iconic design
and a classic crowd-pleaser.
The Colonel sold his first KFC
Bargain Bucket in the late-
1950s and it has firmly secured
its place on the chain’s menu
around the globe. Now seen as
a collectors’ item and available
for sale on eBay, a vintage
bucket could now fetch $50.
HEART-SHAPED
CHOCOLATE BOX
The novelty of a heart-shaped
chocolate box means it’s still
a big seller on Valentine’s Day
and instantly recognisable. No
matter who the manufacturer
is, when people see a red,
heart-shaped box, they know
what’s inside.
TIFFANY BLUE BOX
Crowned with a white satin
ribbon tied at the counter, the
Tiffany Blue Box, as the com-
pany says, is an “international
symbol of style and sophis-
tication”. Almost as coveted
as the jewellery inside, the
trademarked robin’s egg blue
boxes can only be obtained
with a purchase from the store
or by spending a tidy sum on
a second-hand one from eBay
of Etsy.
PRINGLES
Saving the world from crushed
crisps, the unmistakable
Pringles tube was an ingenious
solution created by designer
Fred Baur in 1968 and perfectly
houses a neat stack of 100
saddle-shaped Pringles, along
with a resealable lid that keep
your crisps fresh.
DESIGN
BENJAMIN CHIOU
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9. Revolution on the streets as cities go high tech
Technology has the potential to turn cities into cost-saving, efficient urban hubs that can protect the environment and improve residents’ quality of life
T
he days of the traffic warden
could soon be numbered. Cit-
ies are looking to dispense
with the uniformed enforcers
who pound the streets looking for ille-
gally parked cars, doling out tickets and
imposing fines.
But careless parkers should not re-
joice too soon as there’ll be no parking
free for all. Like so many professions,
the civic enforcement officers are likely
to fall victim to digitisation. Cities are
looking at embedding digital sensors
into parking spaces that read vehicle
number plates and can tell how long an
automobile is parked. The data will be
collected centrally and parking charges
made directly to the driver’s bank ac-
count, as will any fines.
Parking is just one of many areas set to
be transformed by the smart city revolu-
tion. City leaders are looking to use the
latest technology to save cash and help
turn their urban jungles into digital Gar-
dens of Eden. From smart parking and
intelligent rubbish bins, which alert col-
lection vans when they are full, to street
lights that only shine when people walk
beneath them, cities are going high tech.
“There are a few technologies around
now that are radically going to change
the way we operate in cities,” says Peter
Reynolds, chief technology and innova-
tion officer for the Future Cities Cata-
pult, a body that promotes smart cities
in the UK.
Mr Reynolds warns that spiraling
social care costs from a growing popula-
tion of older people and children, along-
side deep cuts in funding, mean local
authority budgets are coming under in-
creasing pressure.
Local authorities are seeing their
budgets slashed as part of central gov-
ernment’s austerity drive, in some cases
by up to 40 per cent over the next five
years. At the same time, urban popula-
tions are exploding; London will have
more than a million extra inhabitants in
the next 15 years.
“What this says to me is that as a socie-
ty we have to get much better at how we
design and provide
our services, and
technology is going
to have to play a key
role in doing that,”
says Mr Reynolds
As with so many
developments in
the modern econo-
my, data will be the
fuel of the smart
city engine. A hand-
ful of UK cities are
grasping the nettle
and looking to transform their services.
Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester
and Milton Keynes are all experiment-
ing with new ways of running services
with the latest technologies. They are
using the internet of things, installing
sensors across infrastructure to gather
information on usage and to help direct
operations centrally.
A number of cities are experiment-
ing with driverless cars, the ultimate
in smart city technology. City au-
thorities are also collecting data from
everything from pedestrian flows,
population estimates and energy use,
and looking for ways to use the infor-
mation to improve services.
Key to smart-city
thinking is allowing de-
velopers to access the
centrally collected data
about urban activities
so they can then turn
this into useful appli-
cations, whether in
transport, healthcare,
improved air quality or
energy use. Open data
will be key for smart
cities to thrive.
For instance, London
Datastore, created by the Greater
London Authority, offers 600 datasets
on its website and receives some 45,000
unique users a month. It features data
on public transport journeys, supplied
by Transport for London. This data has
helped create the Citymapper smart-
SMART CITIES
DAVID BENADY
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dition, there are plans to develop tele-
care, where sensors are installed in the
homes of elderly and vulnerable people
to alert carers to problems.
But placing sensors across city in-
frastructure and collecting increasing
amounts of data about civic activities
could create a prying, Orwellian state.
Citizens need to be aware of how per-
sonal data is collected and encouraged
to become informed about the move to
smart cities – to keep a watchful eye.
New cities across the globe are being
built with smart infrastructures, such
as the Songdo International Business
District in South Korea, constructed on
reclaimed land near the capital Seoul.
Another is Masdar City in Abu-Dhabi,
which is being built as a clean tech hub.
A challenge for many UK cities is how
to graft or retrofit smart technology on
to existing Victorian urban infrastruc-
ture. In 2013, Glasgow beat a number of
other cities to win £24 million worth of
funding from the Technology Strategy
Board, now known as Innovate UK, to
experiment with smart city initiatives.
For instance, it has created the Glasgow
Operations Centre, which brings togeth-
er city-wide CCTV, traffic management
and police intelligence so the authori-
ties can respond to a range of incidents
across the city.
The UK is also building developments
from scratch with plans for three new
garden cities. The Ebbsfleet Garden City
in Kent, with capacity for 15,000 new
homes, recently appointed developer
Aecom and promises to have smart-city
thinking at its heart.
As Louise Wyman, Ebbsfleet Devel-
opment Corporation’s director of strat-
egy, says: “In future in Ebbsfleet, we’ll
see a green corridor, a linear park with
people cycling and kids walking, maybe
outdoor gym equipment. Under the
grass and trees there would be high-ca-
pacity cables to get data into homes, so
they have real-time bus information, so
they can see when the next train to Paris
leaves and when the bus will be outside
the door to take them to that train.
“There will be a new sewage system
and water supply, and we can have
smart meters in people’s homes to see
how much water they are using, how
to use greywater to
flush loos.”
Aecom’s director of
design, planning and
economics Tom Ven-
ables believes the key
issue for smart cities
is integration, bring-
ing together different
utilities and organ-
isations, involved
with running the in-
frastructure, to share
their data. “The most
important thing is
that it’s all facilitated by one body, with
lots of people doing their own thing, but
it is important to bring them all togeth-
er,” says Mr Venables.
He adds: “At the moment, people
around the world are struggling to
define smart cities. But I think as time
goes on, in the next five to ten years, it
will just be the norm. Tech is evolving
so rapidly, it will be expected that it is
in place where you live. At Ebbsfleet
this will be there from the start. In
five to ten years, it will be the new
normal everywhere.”
phone app for London, which offers
easy-to-use transport information all
in one place, from bus timetables to cy-
cling and walking times.
Meanwhile, Bristol is looking to become
a test-bed for smart initiatives and has
a high-speed fibre network – a leftover
from cabling infrastructure – to power
the project. The city wants to link up Bris-
tol University’s supercomputer with part-
ners, such as technology firm NEC, to in-
stall sensors and connectivity across the
urban infrastructure. The Bristol is Open
project will turn the city into a petri dish
for innovation, providing the infrastruc-
ture to allow development to flourish.
“Rather than someone sitting in the
middle of the city pulling levers, it
is an open, programmable city,” says
Max Wide, strategic
director of business
change at Bristol City
Council. “It is akin to
the Apple App Store
– we create the infra-
structure and create
the rules and see
what developers can
do with it.”
An area where Mr
Wide says centralis-
ing data has brought
transformative re-
sults is in the city’s
scheme to help troubled families. “We
bring together in one place data sets
from our partners, from the council,
education and health. By bringing the
information together we can work with
families on the edge of getting into dif-
ficulties, where the tell-tale signs exist
in different agencies. Only when you
correlate them does that allow us to
work with these families before they get
into difficulties,” he says.
Mr Wide acknowledges that such ap-
proaches are not infallible and says
there can be “false positives”. Data gives
only general results and may indicate
problems where they don’t exist. But
the system can indicate those who are
potentially facing difficulties. In ad-
Citizens need to be
aware of how personal
data is collected and
encouraged to become
informed about the move
to smart cities – to keep a
watchful eye
Bristol, Glasgow,
London, Manchester
and Milton Keynes are
all experimenting with
new ways of running
services with the latest
technologies
Through geothermal, wind and
solar power generation and stor-
age, sustainable buildings of the
future will be able to manage
their own energy demand to cut
costs and emissions. Harness-
ing connectivity will also drive
significant savings, from energy
usage to maintenance costs,
with power, heating, ventila-
tion, air conditioning, lighting,
elevators, security, fire detectors
and equipment monitoring all
hooked up through the internet
of things.
In an effort to cut operations
and maintenance bills, which
had reached $300 million
a year, the state of Missouri
upgraded separate control
systems for 32 million square
feet of facilities across its
real estate portfolio into a
shared information manage-
ment system, which controls
systems for more than 1,000
buildings through a single
portal from one location.
Making existing infrastructure
smarter is a daunting task,
but one that is imperative for
advancing city networks to
the digital age. Modern infra-
structure must be resilient yet
adaptable to changing condi-
tions, with the use of sensors
and data management to
control the flow of traffic,
water, energy and people in
the most efficient and cost-ef-
fective way possible.
London’s mammoth $14.8-bil-
lion Crossrail project will
expand rail transport capacity
by 10 per cent, through a
42km east-west tunnel under
the city. High-tech trains,
which begin their journeys on
Crossrail’s outer branches, will
run on existing overground
rails, but will have to switch to
a different subway signalling
system while in motion.
With the continued boom in
urban energy usage, utility
networks across cities must
become greener. Integrated
energy management systems,
from smart grids to smart
meters, and big data analytics
should result in more efficient
homes, new tariff options,
more accurate billing for cus-
tomers and improved outage
restoration. It is estimated
that European households
could save 10 per cent of their
consumption, equal to £30
each year, through
smart meters alone.
Fujisawa SST (Sustainable
Smart Town) on the out-
skirts of Tokyo is said to
be one of the world’s most
advanced eco towns. Each
of the 1,000 new houses on
the site is equipped with
solar panels and an energy
storage system, as part of the
town’s plan to cut average
CO2
emissions by 70 per cent
compared with the 1990s.
As technology advances,
travellers’ expectations of
seamless movement and their
impatience with outdated
systems continue to grow.
From smart parking, in which
users are sent mobile updates
on the nearest available
spaces, to the growing avail-
ability of grab-and-go cars
in some countries, and travel
payments via wearable tech,
the pace of city life shows no
signs of slowing. For those
looking for a more comfort-
able commute, real-time
transport updates to mobile
phones can help navigate
overcrowding and congestion
on busy routes.
Barcelona, bestowed with the
title of World’s Smartest City
2015, has a city-wide, free-ac-
cess, public wi-fi network with
461 access points, and plans
to increase the network with
1,520 points across public
spaces, parks, buses and
metro stations.
Increasing urbanisation
means more traffic and more
pressure on city resources
and infrastructure; conges-
tion already costs the UK
economy £24.5 billion a year
in lost production. Intelligent
traffic networks, such as
real-time monitoring of traffic
flow, e-tolling and big data
analytics, can help to reduce
congestion, cut emissions and
improve safety, while at the
same time slash commuter
times for those who use busy
city roads each day.
Copenhagen has a Green
Wave traffic light system to
encourage the use of bikes.
The traffic lights favour
cyclists over cars and those
riding at the optimum speed
of 20km/h should be able to
ride for miles without ever
seeing a red signal.
BUILDINGS
INFRASTRUCTURE
ENERGY
MOBILITY
TRANSPORT
savings in repair costs
are being realised when
networked buildings enable
proactive maintenance
30%
Source: Realcomm
global annual savings
could be made from a viable
60% improvement in
infrastructure productivity
$1trn
Source: McKinsey
estimated value of the global
smart energy technologies
market, including smart
grid, by 2020
$220bn
Source: Zpryme Research
of drivers in cities
are looking for
a parking space
30%
Source: Deutsche Telekom
hours of traffic delays a year
are incurred on average by
city travellers
50
Source: IBM
06 | PUBLIC SECTOR TECHNOLOGY 10 / 11 / 2015 | RACONTEURraconteur.net PUBLIC SECTOR TECHNOLOGY | 07RACONTEUR | 10 / 11 / 2015 raconteur.net
