Making connections with planned obsolescence.

Rosseau Lake College recently hosted Senior School Alumni Mentor Day during which Grade 11 and 12 students had the opportunity to work on their Discovery Days project pitches with the guidance and support of alumni, board, and community members.

I supervised afternoon sessions during which I had the pleasure of meeting Kim Aitken, founder of Aitken Frame Homes. She ran student groups through a design cycle activity during which they attempted to reimagine either a water bottle or a cell phone. Later, during her second session, she took what had been created during the first session and had the students contemplating product life cycles. One student was incredulous at the suggestion that a water bottle would have been a luxury item 1,000 years ago. I really enjoyed being a fly on Kim’s session wall. Thanks, Kim!

Her line of questioning had me thinking about planned obsolescence and light bulbs, if only peripherally, until today when I started to read about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Built the year before my own mother was born and tragically sunk shortly before I myself was born, when they built her did they have a product life cycle in mind? Was seventeen years much less than what they had in mind at the outset of its construction?

Companies wishing to stay profitable rely on planned obsolescence to ensure that their customers keep buying and that the money keeps rolling in. Is this true of every company, or would a ship-building company be an exception to this line of thinking? If you have ever watched Mighty Cruise Ships you know that a lot of time, energy, and materials goes into the creation and maintenance of modern ships. What is the mindset of the coordinator of such a feat of modern engineering?

If you work for a living you might be amused at the thought of having both the time and presence of mind to contemplate how long something will last when you are in the act of creating it. When I was helping to organize Senior School Alumni Mentor Day I was busy trying to make sure that all Grade 11 and 12 students would know where to go, when to be there, and what to expect. I was not thinking about how useful my digital creations would be after that moment of desperate need.

Livermore’s centennial light continues to burn at the time of this writing, and you can see it for yourself on its bulbcam. Will all of the Google Documents that I have created as a part of my role still exist one-hundred years from now? Will the detailed instructions contained within each of them have shaped the course of each student’s life in a meaningful way? I feel as much uncertainty in this as I am sure Captain Ernest McSorley felt on that fateful day as he navigated Lake Superior’s gales of November. I’m holding my own.