Obviously you can design something to fail - that bit is easy, just under-specify capacitor voltage ratings, resistor power ratings, or over-volt your chips. But to design something that works for around a year and then fails?
Well, how would you do it? Electronic components aren't aware of the passage of time. You can't tell a resistor "work for 12 months, then burn out". Obviously you could install a software bomb if you are using a microcontroller, but that would be better described as sabotage rather than failure.
That's pretty easy and no conspiracy here. Just a business...
You can just skip some mandatory process steps during manufacturing electronic components or use more cheap materials. Modern technology can predict how it will affect lifetime pretty precise, with precision of weeks or even days.
So, you can optimize manufacturing process in that way to get planned lifetime at minimal cost. And it appears that de-facto standard for electronics lifetime planning is about 1 year or even less.
The goal is to manufacture product at min price and sell it at max price and and avoid expenses for RMA during guarantee period.
Just a business...
Regarding on how to make electronic components so short live, its not hard at all. For example skipping some steps during silicon manufacture can give you about a month of lifetime then it just fails and don't start anymore. Some technology like flash memory has very short lifetime by design.
Some modern sdcards can retain the data with no power just for one year and has so small endurance that you can get total failure within one week or even less with just aggressive using it for writing the data.
The issue with flash memory involve almost any microcontroller-powered device, almost all modern electronics. If you don't power it for years, it's just fails with zero time usage due to data loss on the flash memory.
Cheap electrolytic capacitors lifetime is pretty short and dramatically reduced if you use it at high temperature. Almost all modern electronics is compact, it means that there is bad ventilation and manufacturer may "optimize" the cost by removing some mandatory thermal design measures to use less and more cheap materials and components. As result, capacitors lifetime is dramatically reduced.
Not because conspiracy, just to reduce manufacturers expenses. Just a business...
As result the more modern technology give us a total garbage junk products which looks very good at a glance...
And unfortunately this issue affects not only consumer electronics, but also aircraft, space and military technology, just because almost all electronics become more and more cheap and turns into junk and there is no sense to manufacture good quality and long lifetime products, because it leads to bankruptcy. Officials helps to make things even much worse with regulations due to mafia corruption which they calling "green technology". So even if you want to find good quality and long lifetime products, you can't. Due to official regulations and simply because it is not profitable from a business point of view.
That's why we have more and more aircraft failures and man-made disasters these days, even despite the very strict quality control management and the most stringent control processes in such areas like medical, aircraft, space, nuclear and military.