What is dark design? What I call dark design or dark engineering is when a manufacturer designs a piece of equipment to fail. You see this all the time, across all products it seems, They work good for a little while and then it falls all to pieces.

One of the first examples of dark engineering I can recall is when Whirlpool way back in the day decided it would buy out the Maytag washer. They did it because the Maytag washer was so good that they could not compete with it.

I learned appliance repair in the 70’s in my father’s laundromats and we used to buy those old-school Maytag‘s 200 at a time. They were very easy to work on, they had very few working parts, they could be accessed and maintained easily.

They were so good in fact that Whirlpool Kenmore bought out this company so that they would not have to compete with it. Once they took it over they immediately snatched the best made washer that ever existed off the market.

I still see one occasionally, here are there, hidden in some back corner in a laundry room, still doing their job still battling. Still keeping the laundry clean. For the most part you can keep them going until the transmission or tub seal go, then it’s time for an appliance funeral.

However, I hardly ever see them these days. These days I spend most of my time telling people that that expensive appliance they bought, whether it be a refrigerator or a washer or the dryer is bad because one part of it has been designed to be very weak knowing that it will not last long.

Let me give you an example, I just left an upright freezer that was about six years old made my Maytag. It was not cooling properly and when I pulled it from the wall to remove the rear panel and check on the compressor, I realized that they did not have a fan blowing air across the compressor to remove the heat.

A lot of the time the issue is that you will see compressor failures like that because the fan that moves air across them and cools them has gone bad. Not so in this case, they didn’t even design one to go on there, this refrigerator has been engineered to fail.

We also see this in the automotive industry older vehicles don’t have as much of this problem, newer ones are loaded with it. For example, on my 2006 Ford work van, if the battery fails, I can just take it out and replace it with a new one and all is well.

On some newer models of cars, if the battery loses power you have to go to the dealership to reset the computer on the car, which can cost a small fortune, this sets a precedent, instead of engineering things to give good service and last a long time. Now they are engineering them to give awful service and for you have to pay out big time any time there’s a problem.

This is going to be a huge problem for all industries in the future. In my opinion, it completely violates the American spirit to run a business this way. The only way to put an end to this kind of corporate greed and engineering is to expose it. To give it a name. And that is what I’m trying to do here, as soon as I can get enough info together, I’m going to start shopping for a senator or congressman to see if a bill can be passed. It is time for us to shut these kinds of perpetrators down.

Article by Brett Singleton – Freelance writer and owner at Appliance Repair Charleston.