Failing to avoid Futures: from Design to the Proactionary Test Drive Cameron Tonkinwise School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University cameront@cmu.edu - MMCH 202A, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-389, USA BIO: Cameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies and Doctoral Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a background in continental philosophy and continues to research what designers can learn from Sociologies of Technology Studies, especially in relation to Sustainable Service Systems. Cameron is currently developing the practice of Transition Design. ABSTRACT: Digital devices are now the pervasive way in which the global consumer class navigates the world. These devices are the result of changes in the modes of production, a shift from industrial to post-industrial designing. These processes involve an accelerated experimentalism that transforms what counts as real. In societies equipped with products of industrial designing, failure was something to be avoided through thoughtful engagements with possible futures. Contemporary societies no longer confine these ‘trials of strength,’ as Latour calls them, to studios, but instead recast the world as a laboratory. Everyday living is being normalized to a forever failing perspectivalism. A seemingly old-fashioned argument insisted that the nature of the real for any particular historical context was determined by its primary means of production. For some time, late capitalist societies are supposed to have been transitioning to post- industrial economies. It is more than 40 years since Daniel Bell’s forecasts (1973), but perhaps only now, with global consumer societies beginning to live their lives through handheld screens, are we finally experiencing post-industrialism. What then is the social ontology structured by such ways of organizing society? What counts as real for us screen-dwellers? If the real is what juts up at us or breaks through our ways of going about our business, what does it mean to fail in post-industrial societies?