Convivial Computing

In 1973, Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality, a book about man's relation to tools ¹. Illich pleaded for a pluralism of responsibly limited tools that guarantee an individual’s right to work with independent efficiency, the development of which is "as unpredictable, creative and lively as the people who use them" (Illich, 1973) ². He pointed to overgrowth and overproduction threatening the right to a liveable environment, which unfortunately led him to ideas on gender and population control that are highly problematic ³. His ideas are included in the Catalog because of their influence on other practices, that picked up on his ideas about limited tools and somehow turned a blind eye to the racist and sexist parts of his writing.

What did inspire others in his work is his imagining of a future society both very modern yet not dominated by industry, which recognizes natural scales and limits ⁴. Illich’s ideas had a big impact on the counterculture. His thinking about social organisation and local interdependence influenced the founders of the permaculture movement, which in turn influenced permacomputing. His ideas about tools created by and for a community of users was a great influence on Lee Felsenstein, one of the first developers of the personal computer, designer of the Osborne-1 and member of the Homebrew Computer Club.

Illich's focus on tools as drivers of change in society, rather than decision making processes under the influence of power structures is very similar to the Whole Earth Catalog's emphasis on access to tools ⁵. This focus led Illich to look at limiting tools in a very limited way, setting limits to growth of production, not questioning why this overproduction happens and by which mechanisms it is made possible. Overproduction in consumer capitalism is made possible and profitable because of exploitation of labour and natural resources, yet Illich doesn't discuss how different social organisation could lead to shifts in power. He dismisses (marginalised) worker ownership over industrial corporations as nontransformative, because it wouldn't challenge the mode of production. Instead he criticized the efficiency of tools as cause for resource depletion and argues for labour intensive tools instead, fighting symptoms rather than the cause and however close he might sound to degrowth economics, his reluctance to think through larger scale socio-political processes makes him sit closer to the individualist and consumerist lifestyle activism promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog: groups of people on the frontier of post-industrial society, prefiguring the lifestyle and labour intensive modes of production which according to him, society will be forced to adopt after the catastrophe caused by unlimited growth has taken place ⁶.

"Continued convivial reconstruction depends on the degree to which society protects the power of individuals and of communities to choose their own styles of life through effective, small−scale renewal" (Illich, 1973, p.47)

Tools for Conviviality is one of those books that seems to have had an influence larger and wider than its readership, and became a symbol for a smaller scale, humanized technology over which people have control and which supports personal interdependence. Problematic ideas were largely ignored and what people found inspiring in his writings is his reimagining of responsibly limited tools serving the needs of the community in which the tools are operated. This has inspired some to rethink computing. A 1987 paper by A. C. Lemke and G. Fisher describes convivial computing as computing in which the user has control over the tool on multiple levels ⁷. Convivial computing should give a user a desired amount of control but shouldn’t require that it be exercised. In their vision, convivial tools will break down the distinction between programming and using programs. They see the distinction between user and programmer as a major obstacle for the usefulness of computers. Convivial tools encourage users to be actively engaged with, and to generate creative extensions to, the artefacts given to them, releasing designers of tools from the impossible task of anticipating all possible uses of a tool and all people’s needs. Lemke and Fisher's ideas about what convivial computing could be like are more interesting than their actual steps towards it as described in their writing. Like Illich, they focus on changing the tool, not the context in which it is used, which greatly diminishes the transformative potential.

Lemke and Fisher describe convivial computing as focusing on ’soft software’, that is software that can be changed by the user, simple and modular, in order to avoid having to anticipate what users might want, and ease of use for both casual and expert users. Unfortunately they imagine this can be achieved through intelligent assistants. Microsoft's Clippy the paperclip, which was added to Word in 2003, is an example of how assistants tend to increase annoyance rather than accessibility. Lemke and Fisher lack the environmental and social motivations of Illich, yet their modular approach based on the selection and combination of existing software components, and the idea of ’soft software’ that turns users into designers, makes convivial computing potentially suitable for use with old hardware and therefore indirectly could encourage repair. Convivial tools are meant to be adaptable to changes in infrastructures, which would be especially true if they were combined with open source licenses allowing adaptation to specific contexts. The combination of some of Lemke and Fischer’s ideas about convivial computing in combination with environmental sustainability could give shape to some of Illich’s ideas about responsibly limited tools, if those limits concerned both ethically sourced resources and renewable energy use rather than production or output, and as long as the people impacted by the tools themselves, and their production, decide on their design and application.

A more recent influence of Illich's Tools for Conviviality is Andrea Vetter's Matrix of Convivial Technology, a paper proposing a tool for assessing technologies for degrowth ⁸. She studied the practices of several grassroots tinkerers, makers, eco-activists and permaculturalists to develop a definition of convivial technologies. She found five dimensions: relatedness, adaptability, accessibility, bio-interaction and appropriateness; and developed a tool relating these to four elements of a tool's life-cycle: materials, manufacturing, use and infrastructure. The tool can be used for research, (self)assessment of tools and political education, to make the ethics informing a tool visible. The five dimensions give a sense of what convivial technology is concerned with:

(1) Relatedness refers to how a technology can support relatedness between humans and non-humans. Examples are composting kitchen waste and using it to grow food in a garden, or federated open source software for communication such as email. (2) Accessibility refers to the material and immaterial means to built or use a technology. This relates to both the materials and knowledge needed to construct something, but also the social and financial supports needed. (3) Adaptability is about resisting monopolies by aiming for tools that can both link to larger infrastructures but can also function independently. Vetter relates it to the permacultural principle “Use small and slow solutions”, which means designing things to work at the smallest scale possible, while remaining practical and energy efficient for that purpose. (4) Bio-interaction refers to going one step further than technologies that are less harmful; it is about actually benefiting ecological cycles, by for instance using materials that are useful in natural systems, while steering clear of green growth in the economic sense, reminiscent of permacomputing. Lastly, (5) appropriateness refers to the relation of input and output in a given context to assess whether a tool 'makes sense' or is wasteful in terms of resource use, reminding of Appropriate Technology ⁹.