The term Strategic Design is increasingly adopted in order to define approaches and methods to develop research and projects at a company or academic level. What do we mean when we say Strategic Design? After more than a decade of reflections, teaching and professional activities around this topic, the foundations of the discipline are established. Basically, we assert that Strategic Design is about conferring to social and market bodies a system of rules, beliefs, values and tools to deal with the external environment, thus being able to evolve (and so to survive successfully) as well as maintaining and developing one's own identity. And, in doing so, influencing and changing the environment too. This paper intends to present a theoretical analysis of Strategic Design by pointing out some of the key points of this discipline, moving from the recent reflections and developments within the Italian and the international scientific community.

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The packaging of industrial food products is the most important means of transmitting a product's image and taste value. When the nature of its interface and its contents are the product of carefully planned imaging, the product has notable advantages in de®ning its image and product identity. Modern food trends dictate an ever-increasing amount of services: The so-called`functional packaging' and`active packaging' are prime examples of this service. The greatest innovation within this category of products consists literally of their interaction with food. These features create numerous fallbacks within all stages of the lifecycle of a product, requiring a complex and multidisciplinary evaluation. The evaluation strategy of services which this packaging will offer to the consumer is still to be de®ned, and still to be identi®ed within the key applications are the interests of the intermediary links of the production process. This requires the evaluation of the semantic and communicative aspects of the packaging which tend to be confused with the foodstuffs, the individualization of appropriate user pro®les, control of logistical and location aspect of production, and a careful analysis of a comprehensive environmental balance, all issues that are parts of the objectives of the European project, Actipak. It is hoped, therefore, that the elaboration of these packaging systems will become a motive to try out a more knowledgeable and systematic design process for foodstuffs, in which innovative technology is used to provide effective bene®ts to the consumer.