Pop-braggadocio-as-innovation-reframe, from Rolling Stone, 9/30/10.

“The record is finished,” says Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am…”Now I have to unfinish it…Everybody’s thinking outside of the box. We’re going to stay in the box, kick the f@#$ing sides out, and now the box is an octagon.”

See previously: Jack White

This package design created a nice frisson of anticipation. (Okay I just wanted to use the word frisson in a post).

Software advertised on the web is often showed in some version of what it might look like on the shelf. Even if there is no box; the software is ordered online and downloaded. There’s no physical tangible artifact. No box, no printed manual, no shrink-wrap, no CD. But the box denotes “I’m for sale” and persists as a representation of the purchase.

Note that some of the above may be actually available in boxes, but I suspect most of them are not. Indeed, some of the box images are incredibly simplistic, iconic rather than representative of what you might see in a store. Maybe someone read these Photoshop tips for creating an image of a product box.

I recently ordered a few curtain rod brackets from Amazon. I was just shy of $25, the magic number for free shipping, so I made use of Amazon Filler, a site that finds items, in ascending order of price, to get you to that needed total for free shipping.

For me, it was dental floss.

A few days later, Amazon tells me that they are going to ship the items separately to speed up service! I guess this makes sense in terms of their infrastructure – wherever the floss is kept, it’s probably far enough from curtain brackets that if they were to get the two items together and then ship to me it would be costlier or more time-consuming that simply sending the items directly to me from each of their origins.

But still – it leads to this strange out of the box experience:

The boxes arrived on the same day; one was sent earlier, but they both got here at the same time. It doesn’t appear to the recipient that it made any difference!

Here’s the two boxes opened, with their various packagings.

And unpacked, all the crapola strewn about.

Our actual items in one box.

And our dental floss tiny in its massive box. So I saved some money on shipping, but cost Amazon (and the environment) another box and inner packaging and all that shipping effort and fuel. Was this a good outcome for me? For Amazon? For all of us? Many factors to balance and I’m uncertain.