Why do businesses design things badly on purpose?
Part of a series on Is Good Design Good For Business?
There is a story, which some don’t think is true but it’s an interesting story all the same, about Henry Ford. It is said he commissioned a survey of the scrapyards of America to find Model-T Fords, and had his engineers take them apart to see which parts had failed. Now they assumed they were doing this so they could make them better, fix them. But no. Rumour has it Henry actually wanted to see which parts were still ok. Ford could save money if they were redesigned to be worse. To fail at the same time as everything else.
Whether that particular story is true or not it raises an interesting point. If you make a great product, and make it to last, what will you do once everyone who wants to buy one has bought one? They won’t need another because you’ve designed the first so well. You will eventually go out of business if you can’t find new customers or create new products.
Consumable and temporary products you need to keep buying are attractive to businesses. They let the business be sustainable and keep going. It is in the interest of a business to make you need to keep coming back. Perhaps they want you to feel like something is good quality, so you grow to love it and like using it. They will design it to be just good enough. Good enough to make you want another, but not so good that you never need to buy another.
Making products that won’t last due to failure isn’t the only way to keep selling the same things. Think about fashion. Styles change every year. People replace their wardrobes year to year with the latest clothes. Not because their old ones have worn out, but because they’re no longer in season. This sort of idea has now made its way into all sorts of products. Cars, though their ‘seasons’ last longer, now go out of date due to their aesthetics faster than their engines will stop working. Phones certainly are stylish and go out. Even kitchen appliances and consumer goods come in and out of fashion nowadays.
Today an even more popular option for businesses is a subscription model. As the internet of things becomes more and more prevalent, I think we will see this happen more and more for hardware as well as software. This is perhaps one of the best plans of the bad bunch for design, because you can have a well designed product that lasts. You simply pay to keep using it, to keep it updated. Having to repeatedly pay to use a product isn’t great though. And it’s nice to actually own things ourselves. Of course there is also the problem of what happens when the business who’s service you are subscribed to switches it off? Do your products become useless? Arlo Gilbert recently vented his frustrations when Google acquired Revolv and then proceeded to not just discontinue its support of the product, but completely shut it down and render all the devices they had sold useless.
Design is becoming superfluous, overloaded, and unnecessary in order for businesses to make more money. It is bad for our wallets, but even worse, it is bad for the environment. We are designing waste when we our producs aren’t built to last. So what can we do?
I think as customers we have a lot of power. We can say no. We can choose to be users of products not consumers of them. Of course, a company would make a lot more money if you have to keep buying their cheap products when they break. But they make more money if you buy something once than if you buy it zero times. If we don’t keep buying the cheap stuff that breaks people will stop making it. There are products out there that are built to last, that you can rely on. They usually cost a little more to start with, but in the long run they are cheaper, and much better.
And don’t just buy fashionable things that you’ll want to change in a few years. Your kettle doesn’t need to be replaced every time a new edition of ‘Kitchens Weekly’ comes out. There is a difference, and one I don’t think a lot of people realise exists, between what looks good because it looks good, and what looks good because fashion says so. If we make good buying choices, and as Viviennee Westwood says “buy less, choose well, and make it last” then companies will be forced to adapt.
And as designers we need to offer these alternatives. We need to design products that will last. That aren’t mode and fashionable. It’s so easy to design something that is trendy and fits with the style of the day. Much more difficult is to create design that stands the test of time. We must learn from the examples of design greats like Dieter Rams:
“We have to move away from the throwaway habit. Things can, and must, last longer. They must be designed so that they can be reused. We need to take more care of our environment. That means not only our personal environment but also our cities and our resources. That is the future of design, to take more care of these basic elements. Otherwise I’m not sure what the future of our planet will be. So designers have to take on that responsibility, and to do so we need more support from government. We need political support to solve the problems with our environment and how we should shape our cities. As designers, we shouldn’t be doing this for ourselves, but for our community.”
