View source for Vance Packard

As American consumerist society was getting into full swing, cultural critic Vance Packard presented a dissident point of view in his book "The Waste Makers" (1960). Packard denounced "the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals." He notably analyzed [[Planned Obsolescence]], a concept first popularized by the American industrial designer Brooks Stevens.

Brooks Stevens had used the phrase [[Planned Obsolescence]] as the title a talk that he gave at an advertising conference in Minneapolis in 1954, and it thereafter became his catchphrase. Stevens defined [[Planned Obsolescence]] as: "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary."

Vance Packard's critique of Planned Obsolescence divided it into two sub-categories: obsolescence of function and obsolescence of desirability, the first being useful, and the second being unnecessary. According to Packard, marketers artificially create "obsolescence of desirability," also called "psychological obsolescence," in order to wear a product out in the owner's mind through changes in "styling," when no other meaningful design contribution can be made to change the product.

==References==
*Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (1960).

==Links==
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

[[Category:Historical Roots]]