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The excessive desire of rational and functional design in modernism leads to the overlooking of the emotional experience for individuals as ones with sensibilities, and thus results in such problems in products as“loss in figure”,“distanced users and machines”, etc., and eventually gives birth to the products as“lonely individuals”. This type of“loss”can be found in such phenomena as“shape with the lack of convenience in operation”,“figure with the absence of distinctness”and so on, in the field of hard-packaging-container design, which directly brings about the loss of shape-based language for hard packaging containers, as well as the split of context, exercising restraint on the innovative development of hard packaging containers severely.The research of hard packaging containers as semantic carriers focuses on the relationship between the shape and the meaning of hard packaging containers, namely, the conveyance of certain type of meaning by means of shape, and specifically, the delivery of information to audience with the aid of shape representation: what are the containers designed for; what are the functions; how to use them readily; what about the performance and quality, ect., which require no explicit explanation coming from the instruction or the designer, since the hard packaging container itself can offer the interpretation. Besides, things beyond the content of the products should be implicitly embodied in the shape of containers– the symbolic significance of hard packaging containers in terms of psychology, society, culture, and so forth, in the specific context of using. The paper, rooted in semiotic and liguistic ideological system, takes the research achievements of semantics in relevant fields of endeavor as guidance, and thus applies the borrowed concept of shape-based meaning to the domain of hard-packaging-container research creatively. In certain context, hard packaging containers reflect the properties of easy identification and operation, clear information conveyance, various emotions, experience of psychological needs, etc., by means of such elements in shape constitution as figure, color, material, function and so on. Thus, they pave the way for the new design thinking pattern and research methodology in packaging design, so as to go beyond the single dimension of visual-image symbols, to enable shape-based meaning to represent the distinctive life tension, and to add the sensible affinity to the shape of hard packaging containers.
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