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Planned Obsolescence
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  1. American Ground Transport
    A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Bus and Rail Industries

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1974
  2. Collective Memory and Cultural Amnesia
    Introduction to the December 17, 2017 issue of Other Voices

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Our society is obsessed with the short-term present. It devalues memories and the past. That's the nature of capitalism, especially the speeded-up hypercapitalism of today. The past is useless: profits are made by getting rid of the old and replacing it with something new.
  3. Design for the Real World
    Human Ecology and Social Change

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1973
    While two-thirds of the world's population lives in poverty, valuable human and natural resources are used to produce: fur-covered toilet seats, electronic nail polish dryers, diapers for parakeets, and mink-oil fertilizer for "the plant that has everything." Papanek discusses why the things you buy are expensive, badly designed, unsafe, and often don't work. He proposes alternative ways of thinking and alternative designs for safe, inexpensive, and desperately needed products.
  4. For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LED bulbs
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    In 1924, representatives of the world's leading lightbulb manufacturers formed Phoebus, a cartel that fixed the average life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, ensuring that people would have to regularly buy bulbs and keep the manufacturers in business. But hardware store LED bulbs have a typical duty-cycle of 25,000 hours -- meaning that the average American household will only have to buy new bulbs ever 42 years or so.
  5. How Things Don't Work
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1977
    Pananek and Hennessey focus on appliances, tooks, and devices that are at the nub of modern living. They show how some of our most cherished possessions, ranging from simple household fixtures to sophisticated electronics, don't work, and challenge us to rethink the uses of technology to demand and create products that are useful, built to human scale, safe, ecologically sound, and inexpensive.
  6. The Waste Makers
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1967
    Packard criticizes the development of an economy and a society based on deliberate waste.

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