The short film, The
Lightbulb Conspiracy explores the development and implementation of planned
obsolescence throughout the 1900’s and early twenty first century. This
documentary style film closely follows the journey of design obsolescence and
has many significant examples right from the first light globes through to
Apple’s IPod. The underlying message of the film is the impact which planned obsolescence
is having on the environment, with millions of tonnes consumer good waste
entering landfill and dump sites. The film portrays the throw away lifestyle of
the western world and aims at educating designers and the general public about
the push to move away from planned obsolescence.
The introduction of Thomas Edison’s lightbulb in 1881 was one
of the greatest inventions of the 1800’s. However, his lightbulb lasted a
significantly long period of time before the need for replacement. This saw a
downturn in consumer need and there begun the thinking behind planned obsolescence.
The creation of the world wide cult, Phoebus was the beginning of planned obsolescence,
where manufactures would fix the life of the product in order to increase
consumer need. This behaviour at the time was not seen as unethical but through
the industrial revolution more and more consumers began shopping for fun not
need which created massive amounts of consumer good waste due to consumer’s
throw away lifestyle. As more and more products reached their end of life
people began to witness the environmental impacts of their behaviours. Anti-growth
societies were created and took on Ghandi’s vision, ‘the world is big enough to
satisfy everyone’s needs but will always be too small to satisfy individual
greed’. As seen in the video, thousands of tonnes of waste goods were being
shipped to Ghana where their natural environment was being destroyed. As modern
day designers we can reflect on the past and acknowledge the wrong doings of
designers of the twentieth century. A more recent example of planned obsolescence
was the release of Apple’s first IPod with an obsolete battery in order to
maintain consumer demand. As a result of this immoral conduct they were sued
and forced to fix the problems they created. Of recent times Apple has
increased their market share by producing more products to complement their
range while morally producing quality products.
In order to design sustainably and construct eco-friendly
products, planned obsolescence must be eradicated and designers must find new
ways to develop products while maintaining consumer demand. There are an abundance
of new technologies, materials and processes which aid designers in producing
such products.
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