The Design Secret Behind Water Bottle Stacking on Trucks: One Good Smack!

While driving back home from the gym, I saw a guy stack 20L cooler bottles into his tempo and I heard a loud “smack”! That’s when an interesting packing technique caught my eye:

Bottom layer: all upright.

Top layer: the center bottles upright, the edge ones flipped upside down, their necks neatly locking into the gaps below. A quick smack, and boom — no straps, no nets, just geometry doing its thing. The periphery held the central bottles in place!

Diagram showing how the bottles are stacked

Why does this work so well?

• No additional cost gone into fasteners.

• Very tight fit with low chances of bottles falling out during transportation.

• Barely any time and effort required while stacking.

• Best thing - it just works!
  

Proof that sometimes the best fastening tool is just… a well-timed smack.

The question is: was this stacking technique preconceived by the designer and were the bottles designed intentionally to accommodate for this, or was it found by the workers later?

As a designer, my takeaways from this tiny observation are multifold:

• While conceiving a product one must consider how that object interacts with other objects as well as human behavior.

• Invisible affordances: Products tend to have potential affordance aside than from its actual use case.

• Look outside, observe, everything out there is a result of some design decision.

The tempo/truck that held all the bottles.