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During handling and transportation, a product may be damaged due to mechanical shocks resulting mainly from impact. The current design practice of expandable polystyrene (EPS) protective packaging hinges on two main aspects: the determination of the size of the basic features of the buffer cushions (procedural); and the selection of an appropriate buffer configuration and its related arrangements (heuristics), and depends largely on the designer’s competence and experience. Discusses an integrated design approach for protective packaging, which aims to integrate both these aspects into a seamless design process, using multiple layers of neural networks to characterise the cushioning curve patterns of EPS materials, determine cushioning configurations and arrangements based on package‐to‐product characteristics, and size the buffer features. The favourable results obtained from a study comparing manually‐designed and network‐generated buffer configuration solutions highlight the potential of the approach.