Designing for People and Place A Case Study of Packaging Development for Local Winemakers in Lower Silesia

This paper presents an in-depth case study of a packaging development process carried out with local winemakers in Lower Silesia, an emerging wine region in Poland. The study examines packaging not only as a branding or communication tool, but as an integral component of local wine value chains, shaping how value is created, communicated, and captured under conditions of structural change in the wine sector. Using a design-led and participatory research approach [1,2], the paper documents a collaborative process involving designers and small-scale wine producers, including workshops, interviews, and iterative prototyping. The analysis focuses on how packaging choices are shaped by producers’ economic constraints, sustainability considerations, market positioning, and attachment to place. The findings show that packaging development supports the transformation of local wine value chains by strengthening place-based differentiation [3,4], facilitating direct-to-consumer communication, and enabling adaptive strategies oriented toward local markets rather than scale-driven competition. By integrating design processes into wine value chain analysis, the paper contributes to wine economics and policy debates by highlighting packaging as an underexplored, yet policy-relevant, mechanism for supporting resilient and locally embedded wine sectors.