EXOD, the interstellar travel of spirits

Make a Mark is a design innovation project developed by three emerging global companies: Estal, Avery Dennison, and LEONHARD KURZ; a platform for sharing ideas around pillars like sustainability, luxury, and innovation, and also to experiment with state-of-the-art packaging technologies to bring ideas to life, free from everyday limitations.

Morillas was invited to participate in the latest edition of Make a Mark, where we developed a project to reflect the future of spirits. Thus, we imagine a future in which, after draining Earth’s resources, humanity is forced to escape to survive.

Human history is a story of journeys and survival. Great migratory movements arise from colossal tragedies. Every era has its own migratory movement. Climate change and the progressive approach of the Earth towards the Sun push us rapidly towards the future: interstellar travel. At 11 light-years away, Ross 128b is the second closest exoplanet to the Earth, and has the best potential conditions to host human life.

This story begins on EXOD, the ship that will lead us through the cosmos to this planet. So, we speculate about how rice, thanks to its cultivation in water, could be one of the most viable raw materials to obtain spirits… or how it could be fermented and distilled in zero gravity, by adapting our processes to the conditions of this new environment.

Following the boldness of the concept, we chose to design a new, unprecedented bottle strongly linked to the interstellar environment. We imagined the preservation conditions in a zero-gravity context, consistently drawing from the hypothesis, but with a credible conceptual form. The bottle design serves as a preservation capsule with a minimalist front and symmetry in all its axes. The floating liquid comes to life within its curved shapes, while the enigmatic cap, reduced to the minimum expression, encrypts an opening as a ball-and-socket joint, sealed and pressurized.

The 360° movement of weightlessness led us to create multiple ways of reading the graphic content, applied on various labels and through diverse printing systems. Transparency combined with descriptive and encrypted messages such as the sake brewing process, the coordinates of Ross 128b or a message of hope were prioritized at all times. Graphic elements inspired by navigation charts prove to be extremely functional and at the same time, beautiful and captivating.

Reinforcing the critical aspect of EXOD, the secondary pack captures the increasingly prevailing reality of our consumerist maelstrom: Waste transformed into valuable material. A pack created from hydroponically cultivated rice husks, and a large proportion of the waste generated by the ship’s own internal consumption.

The project seeks to speculate on the distillates of the 22nd century but also reflects on the dynamics to which we are subjecting our planet and how any possible solution – on or beyond Earth – will only become a reality through collaboration between different countries, because above all, EXOD is an act of courage and hope. This is only one of the potential scenarios in which humanity might find itself. Whatever the future holds, we are already writing it today.