Planned Obsolescence

Origins of Debate

Concern about planned obsolescence began in the United States during the consumer boom of the 1950s. Debate was stimulated by frustration among some industrialists at a perceived decline in the quality of products, which surfaced in research published in the Harvard Business Review. Popular debate followed publication of The Waste Makers, the third in a series of critiques of consumer culture by U.S. journalist Vance Packard.

This debate had been foreshadowed during the Great Depression, when shorter product life spans through regular changes in style were often advocated as a means of stimulating economic activity. The expression planned obsolescence first appeared in 1932 in a pamphlet titled Ending the Depression through Planned Obsolescence in which Bernard London proposed that governments should impose maximum product life spans in times of mass unemployment and require people to turn in their used goods to government agencies. Such an approach has been echoed in recent car scrappage schemes in which governments in Europe and the United States have offered financial incentive to consumers to update their vehicles in periods of economic downturn.

Early evidence of obsolescence being “planned” is often traced to industrial design and, specifically, to a trend in the car industry in the 1920s, spearheaded by General Motors, toward periodical changes in style. By the early 1930s, designers Roy Sheldon and Egmont Arens were promoting “obsoletism” as a “device for stimulating consumption.” Brooks Stevens, another designer, is often reported to have first introduced the term planned obsolescence into public debate in 1954, describing it as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary” (quoted in Adamson 2003, 4). It was some twenty years before Victor Papanek posed an alternative view of the role of designers.

The debate faded during the global economic problems of the 1970s and was only briefly revived following an investigation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1982. In recent years, however, interest in product life spans has been revitalized in the context of debate on sustainable consumption and production, prompted by a report by the U.K.-based New Economics Foundation, Beyond Recycling, and a book about an initiative led by designers in the Netherlands, Eternally Yours.

Planned Obsolescence in Context

Obsolescence takes different forms. Absolute obsolescence is when a product reaches the end of its technical life because its durability is expended and it is no longer able to withstand wear and tear from use. It reflects the product's “design life,” the specification that determines its intrinsic durability. Relative obsolescence, by contrast, is the result of technological, psychological, economic, and other influences on product life spans, which may or may not be intentionally planned by producers.

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