As we head toward the holiday season it’s a good time to reflect on the past year. I find that December is a great time to bring together everything you learned during the year and share it. I’m going to do just that during the month. Here are two areas I explored that I thought might help your brain percolate as well.
The challenge of change
I had the opportunity to hear some great speakers in our industry discuss how they feel about change. At the PIA Teacher’s Conference at Graph Expo, Kurt Konow of Ricoh talked about some advancements that by 2030 would change the world. One item that came up was real time electronic translation (which would eliminate the need for knowing other languages). This technology is very close to ready, and it would definitely change how and with whom we do business. Hal Hinderliter also discussed some of the Must See’em technologies at the show. I was impressed with the awards overall, but particularly interested in the software type applications that won (paper with a click factor, Facebook integrations, virtual store creation and many more). It finally feels like we are starting to think outside of the box! I think Peter Cober drove home a point during his talk at Print World. “You cannot do the same things and expect different results,” he emphasized. (On a side note this quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein as the definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results)
The growth of packaging
At Ryerson, I’ve been quite involved with expanding the packaging curriculum. The opportunities in this sector have been very positive. You can read about some of them in this issue: from PAC scholarships, to a large Esko donation, to incredible student interest by way of competitions. This month’s issue also contains an article about PackEx, which took place in Montreal this past month. Read and learn about a variety of technologies unique to packaging. Three of our senior students share their PackEx experiences with you. There are of course growth areas in commercial print, but what is unique about packaging is that it is very solution oriented. It’s difficult to create a package without the end in mind, whether because of legislation, retailer requirements, etc. Of course the lesson is that offset printing has that same opportunity to create unique solutions—we need to remember this when creating products.
There were other themes that came up during the year. What did you notice in 2012? What did you learn?
