The techniques taught during this workshop were very straightforward and largely without the usual little twists I tend to work into my courses - this was a basic packaging design workshop. The only twist being that the objects they had to package were rocks and branches. This was at first a larger hurdle for the students than I thought it'd be, it was hard for them to see these found objects as products. I had made up a background story and that somewhat helped, but it wasn't until near the end that they fully accepted that these rocks and branches were like any other object that needed packaging. It was a great succes and we did it for three reasons: 1) the wouldn't be able to mimic already existing packaging designs by googleing "Rock packaging". 2) the strangeness of the objects would hopefully make them think outside the box - in every sense. 3) they'd have to think about flexibility in packaging, because branches and rocks tend to differ slightly in design... read on