Product Design

Planned Obsolescence 1 The Engineered Expiration – Part 1: How Designed Decay Became the Core Business Model 2 The Engineered Expiration – Part 2: Software Lock-Ins and the Digital Decay of Connected Devices 3 The Engineered Expiration – Part 3: Dismantling the Fix-It Culture Through Planned Repair Prevention 4 The Engineered Expiration – Part 4: From Corporate Profit to Corporate Crime: The Environmental Cost of Artificial Limits 5 The Engineered Expiration – Part 5: The Regulatory Tide: Right to Repair and the Global Push for Longevity ← Series Home The Cartel that Codified the Concept of Consumption In December 1924, a clandestine agreement was reached by the world’s largest light bulb manufacturers, including Philips, General Electric, Osram, and Compagnie des Lampes. This group, known historically as the Phoebus Cartel, moved deliberately to limit the lifespan of their products. Before the cartel, the incandescent light bulbs invented by Thomas Edison and Adolphe Chaillet were intended to last multiple decades. The established market standard of 2,500 burning hours was systematically reduced to just 1,000 hours by 1940. This calculated decision marked the emergence of what would become known as planned obsolescence. ...

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home We are all prone to self-deception. This is perhaps the most difficult, and most human, obstacle to successful product development. When you’ve poured your nights and weekends into an idea, you fall in love with it. You become emotionally invested. And that emotional investment is exactly what Victor Lombardi warns against in Why We Fail, because it breeds bias—the silent killer of objectivity. ...

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home Every great professional field—from aviation to medicine—treats failure not as a source of shame, but as a source of invaluable data. When a plane crashes, an entire team of experts descends upon the wreckage to determine the exact sequence of events, isolate the root cause, and then mandate new procedures globally. When a patient dies on the operating table, doctors perform a post-mortem not to assign blame, but to extract lessons that save the lives of future patients. ...

Design Lessons from the World's Biggest Flops 1 Your Product Works, But Your Customers Hate It: The Secret to 'Experience Failure' 2 The Pilot's Secret: 3 Ways to Turn Your Failures into Future Success 3 Stop Lying to Yourself! Why the Scientific Method is Your Product's Best Friend ← Series Home The Silent Killer in the Digital Age If you are a builder, an entrepreneur, or even just a consumer, you’ve likely felt the sting of a product that should have succeeded but didn’t. You’ve seen a brilliant concept, executed with technical precision, that simply vanished from the marketplace. Why? The hardware was impeccable. The code was flawless. The servers never crashed. The common wisdom used to be that products failed when they broke. But in our modern, hyper-connected world, a more insidious killer is at work: Experience Failure. ...