Connecting People by Exploring Product Development & IoT Solutions (SMARTENVELOPE) project involves Plast-Farb, a manufacturer of security envelopes for global distribution, based in Poland. The manufacturer, founded in 1987, finds itself surrounded by fewer and fewer independent producers of postal products. The postal services market has become a highly privatised infrastructure, shifting in recent years from being a market dominated by letters, towards an increasing dominance of parcels. In the case of security envelopes, which protect private or sensitive information during the transportation process, the envelopes have evolved into containers made up of multiple material layers, with various treatments and security measures embedded, to ensure maximum security.

The SMARTENVELOPE project aims to produce a smarter security envelope, with the ‘smart’ aspect being approached from three different perspectives: smartness in the sense of digital connectivity; smartness in the sense of sustainability; and smartness in the sense of envelope lifespan and after life.

The artist in this project, David Rickard, is a London-based artist whose work considers material and spatial perception to explore the interconnected nature of the world. In this project, he will be considering the role of the ‘global traveller’ – the envelope – and in doing so, exploring what the envelope is, where it goes, what is does, and how its life ends. These questions will lead to experiments on how to ‘smarten’ the envelope on different levels. To achieve this, the team will work intensively together with technology provider AND-TECH to translate the concepts for digital and physical connectivity into industry 4.0 interventions.