Imagine that you had invented a thingamajig that was widely recognized to be of high quality and very useful. Soon, everyone was buying one and your hard-earned investment was paying off. The, suddenly or slowly, purchases started to drop and the money was only come in dribs and drabs. You’d reached the dreaded saturation point at which everyone who needed your fantastic thingamajig already had one and, since you had created something with such high quality, the only people who ever purchased another were those who had lost it somehow. At this point you have to invent something else that everybody is going to need if you want to continue to make money.
If, however, your invented doohickey had in it a joint that weakened and broke after 200 uses or if the outer covering of it could be redesigned to make the old one look so unfashionable as to be embarrassing, why you’d be back in business. The idea of planning for future failure, or engineering need for continuing purchases into a design, is termed planned obsolescence and was popularized as a concept in the 1950s by Brooks Steven.
The idea of creating a product with a built-in design flaw so that new purchases would be required is so off-putting that it is actually illegal in some places. This includes the practice of offering the spare part for purchase only for a limited time, requiring the purchase of an entirely new unit once those parts are no longer available. It’s not necessarily a result of a shadowy cabal meeting to determine the best way to fleece the consuming public, but whatever its roots, 3D printing is providing a way for consumers to plan their way out of planned obsolescence
Thanks to the open source, share and share alike nature of the 3D printing community, you most likely would be able to just download the part that someone else had already 3D modeled rather than struggling to create the digital model required for printing. And with a plethora of online 3D printing services, such as Sculpteo, you wouldn’t even actually have to print them yourself. In effect, a catalog of pieces and parts would always be available no matter whether or not the maker of the original device decided to continue to produce them.
This isn’t just good for customers and companies in terms of money, it’s also something that could potentially reduce an enormous amount of unnecessary waste that makes its way to landfills every year. It’s nice when something helps more than just the pockets; it could be part of addressing environmental impacts, the culture of dependence, and the general psychological state of the people living in a consumer society. Discuss in the Planned Obsolescence forum at 3DPB.com.
[Source: Sculpteo]