When you’re suffering through a cold or fever, you don’t always have the presence of mind to check the expiration date of your meds as you rifle through the medicine cabinet. But finding and decoding when your meds have gone bad isn’t always easy, especially when you’re under the weather. So designers Kanupriya Goel and Gautam Goel have envisioned a new type of medication packaging that also expires, providing easy to interpret clues that the meds have gone bad.
The new packaging would use a multi-layered material featuring the standard label layer on top, and a sub-layer with the expiration warning message. In between these layers would be a diffusible material that lets the ink from the bottom layer seep through over time, eventually revealing when the meds were expired.
The approach not only helps prevent consumers from taking expired medication, in theory it would also make it very difficult for shady retailers to sell medicine that’s past its prime. [Red Dot Design Awards via Inhabitat]