Convivial Tools Research Articles

Bending Rules, Telling Stories: Convivial Game Design Approaches for Engaging With Futures

Games have been used in civic participation (Lerner, 2014) and civic learning (Raphael et al. 2010). Building on the idea of using games for participation, democracy and collaboration, we propose approaching games as tools for convivial learning. First introduced by Illich (1973), the concept of conviviality envisions a society characterised by collaboration and self-determination, underpinned by tools that encourage joyful interaction, creativity and human agency through control over the tools. We believe that games as convivial tools could help bring forth creativity and mutual learning about civic processes and desirable futures. Yet, games’ nature as rigid systems of rules (Salen & Zimmerman, 2010) seems potentially at odds with positioning them as tools promoting agency. We propose to use the tension arising between rigidity and agency as starting point for exploring game design strategies for convivial games through research-through-design. We ask how games for thinking about the future may be designed that allow players to exercise control over their own experience, and to what effect. Inspired by the concept of critical play (Flanagan, 2009; Grace, 2014) and building on the distinction between narrative and mechanics as key constituting game elements, we have designed two distinct games for collaboratively engaging with the future. The first, Narrate, focuses on letting players invent their own narrative, whilst the second game Remix allows for experimentation with game rules and mechanics. We present the design process for each game and contrast the different approaches taken. Each game was tested by two groups and analysed in regards to its capacity to bring forth conviviality, creativity and collaboration. The paper compares and provides a discussion on how suitable the two chosen strategies of experimenting with narrative or mechanics are for (1) facilitating thinking and learning about shared futures, and (2) supporting player agency and bringing forth convivial interactions.

AI as a Convivial Tool

Grewal, Guha and Becker (2024) provide an insightful examination of the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of marketing as well as its promises and perils for both individuals and society. In this commentary, we seek to enrich their contribution by proposing an alternative, yet complementary, perspective that conceptualizes AI as a convivial tool. We begin by examining recent AI research in the marketing domain in order to help distinguish research that examines AI as a technology vs. a tool. We then provide an overview of conviviality theory, explain how this theory can be applied to AI, and then identify its three key characteristics. We then put this theory to the test via a field study of AI usage among 136 university students. This initial examination provides support for our thesis and suggests that AI tools such as ChatGPT can enhance user autonomy, engagement and enjoyment. We conclude by discussing the implications of viewing AI as a convivial tool for both marketing thought and practice.

From toxic bonds to healing relationships. A journey through group analytic theory and practice

The essentials of therapeutic practice in group analysis are summarised through three basic principles. The conductor is responsible for fostering a climate that allows each of a group’s members to find their own voice; bear witness to the voices of others; and come out of the shadows together through the group’s discourse. These principles are built on the author’s earlier writing about the speech, silence, and the language of the group which can make a home amongst strangers. They are framed in the ordinary language of daily experience and the parallel idiom of musicology to address the most primary of musical instruments—the voice. They incorporate of a range of other terms and concepts that bring our attention to core complexities at the heart of many peoples’ deepest sources of disquiet arising out of unresolved intergenerational trauma. The group’s work is akin to a mourning process set in motion for hitherto unacknowledged grief. Disturbance can move about unpredictably. Our challenge is to locate and translate hidden, buried or displaced injury into the everyday language of human suffering where seeds can be sown for resolution. This multi-modal presentation is illustrated with clinical vignettes from groups at work and with collage and paintings. It opens with a Paul McCartney song, ‘Blackbird’ (1968), whose music and lyrics give historical significance to the struggle for human rights. Its closing vignettes explore ‘tools for conviviality’ with images of lost and found brotherhood and a spontaneous online ceremony of eating together in China. The paintings of Morris Nitsun bring us to an ultimate agency for change generated by small groups—the shifting mood-scape of their dynamic life. One image conveys the tragedy and desolation of the pandemic, and another offers the natural world’s consolation in beauty.

Convivial Populations: Ivan Illich and Public Health in the 21st Century.

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a historian, social critic, and professor at multiple universities. He came to intellectual fame through his criticisms of modern institutions, including health care, and his concern with social structures that he believed to impede human flourishing. However, Illich has not been thoroughly explored as a source of insight for public health professionals. Although he populates the medical and public health literature, discourse remains sparse about how Illich might contribute to key conversations in public health today. In this article, I explore Illich's potential contributions to modern public health through one of his seminal works, Tools for Conviviality. I frame Illich as a valuable conversational partner for public health professionals at a crucial moment in the field's history. (Am J Public Health. 2024;114(7):723-728. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.307675).

Playing against the rules: a new perspective on the potential of games and play as convivial and critical tools for imagining futures

AbstractIn recent years, we have observed an increased interest within the field of design research in both the concept of conviviality and playful approaches as a pathway to co-design and participation. While play is often associated with freedom of expression and creativity, the implication of rules and mechanics in games poses questions regarding the tension between player agency and designed gameplay. This paper aims to provide reflection on these topics through a lens of ‘critical play’ and presents a model to explore games’ potential as convivial tools for imagining collective futures.

Unmaking capitalism through community empowerment: Findings from Italian agricultural experiences

Capitalism – in the theorizations of sustainability transformation – has been largely taken for granted for its misleadingly assumed stability and homogeneity, thus limiting the scope for defining alternative futures, policy options and strategies for transformative change. Theorizations regarding sustainable transformative pathways have often overshadowed a nuanced landscape of normative and ontological pluralism thus contributing to generating techno-centric and top-down responses to issues such as access to food, farmers' control over the food-chain and global environmental change. The expansion of capital, under a mechanism of production-reproduction, with a constant attempt to subsume different forms of production into the global market, generates manifold temporal frictions that, on the one hand, contribute to the consolidation of the capitalist model and, on the other hand, give rise to conflicting elements and re-orientation of modernity in a process of “unmaking” of capitalism. This article, drawing upon empirical work conducted in Northern Italy, presents two experiences emerging from the scenario of local food networks, namely the “C’è Campo” Participatory Guarantee System and the “Ortazzo” Community Supported Agriculture project. These show elements and mechanisms of local community empowerment for unmaking capitalism from the inside, as steps for a sustainable and bottom-up transformation which do not necessarily imply the generation of socio-economic novelties ex-nihilo. The “conventionalization” of organic agriculture has pushed those actors who participate in local food networks to reconfigure their self-regulation towards a “bottom-up” approach driven by the adoption of PGS or CSA instruments as an attempt to secure or reacquire control over the market and the construction of quality. Convivial tools, in particular, are crucial for understanding - and finding responses to - the social, economic, cultural and environmental crisis that contemporary society is now facing.

Artificial Intelligence in a degrowth context: A conviviality perspective on machine learning

The degrowth movement lacks a concrete vision for technology, thereby disregarding a crucial aspect of the green growth narrative. This paper helps fill this gap by exploring the compatibility of Artificial Intelligence with a degrowth-related concept: convivial tools ‐ tools that promote autonomy, creativity, and relationships among humans and with nature.Degrowth has emerged as a strong voice against the green growth narrative. However, it has so far left largely unshaped its vision for technology, thereby overlooking a pivotal element of the green growth narrative. This article contributes to filling this gap by analyzing the appropriateness of a digital technology, Artificial Intelligence, to a degrowth context. It does so through the angle of conviviality, a concept introduced by Ivan Illich and frequently used by degrowth scholars, which states that convivial tools should foster autonomy, creativity, and relationships among humans and with nature. This paper specifically applies Vetter’s Matrix of Convivial Technology to an application of machine learning with potential environmental benefits: predictive maintenance ‐ a proactive maintenance technique based on real-time sensor monitoring. Three key limitations to its conviviality are identified: 1. the high complexity of machine learning, 2. its environmental impacts, and 3. the size of the infrastructure it relies on. These limitations prompt critical reflections on the appropriateness of machine learning (as a part of Artificial Intelligence) to degrowth but also act as inspirations for reshaping the technology towards more conviviality.

Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies: a Convivial Conversation

In the age of platform society, Critical Media Studies are faced with the challenge of developing not only theoretical proposals capable of critically addressing the power exerted on society by GAFAM-owned digital platforms, but also of envisioning a praxis capable of changing the political economy of this corporate-driven digital media ecosystem. To do this, we believe that Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies should dialogue when it comes to theoretical frameworks and intervention practices. In this paper we propose to start this dialogue building upon the work of Ivan Illich, especially his book Tools for Conviviality. We find that in order to imagine a possible digital media design process able to avoid the creation of radical monopolies, it is necessary to adopt a Convivial Participatory Design approach where issues related to scale, people needs and power inequalities are considered by designers in collaboration with the users.

Toward a Convivial Design

Abstract This article is inspired by the work of Ivan Illich, especially Tools for Conviviality, which critiques industrialization and elaborates Illich's proposal for conviviality and is a major influence on post-development theory. In the early 1970s, Illich anticipated issues that design begins to explore only at the end of the twentieth century. This article discusses what he anticipated and develops this into practical suggestions for the evolution of design. Above all, the article provides suggestions for two intertwined design fields: design for sustainability and codesign. An analysis of Illich's work allows for the identification of three methodological movements acting toward a convivial design: (1) conduct a critique of the status quo, (2) imagine alternative proposals, and (3) carefully qualify the ethos of alternatives.

Tika technology

Digitalisation has the capacity to radically transform the nature of work, redefining tasks, requirements and remuneration. Yet technologies have often been used to reduce worker autonomy, exacerbate racial and gendered inequality and intensify labour precarity. How can digitalisation instead support emancipatory labour conditions? This article introduces the concept of ‘tika technology’, drawing together scholarship on convivial tools, appropriate technology and calm computing to theorise its purposes and principles. To illustrate what these look like in practice, the article provides two real-world examples of tika technology. It concludes by exploring potential benefits at the individual, societal and environmental levels.

Orchestrating entangled relations to stretch the iron triangle: Observations from an LMS migration

A key strategic issue for higher education is how to maximise the accessibility, quality, and cost efficiency of learning and teaching (Ryan et al., 2021). Higher education’s iron triangle literature (Daniel et al, 2009; Mulder, 2013; Ryan et al, 2021) argues that effectively addressing this challenge is difficult, if not impossible, due to the “iron” connections between the three qualities. These iron connections mean maximising one quality will inevitably result in reductions in the other qualities. For example, the rapid maximisation of accessibility required by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a reduction in cost efficiency (increased staff costs) and a reduction in the perceived quality of learning experiences (Martin, 2020). These experiences illustrate higher education’s on-going difficulties in creating orchestrations that stretch the iron triangle by sustainably and at scale fulfilling diverse requirements for quality learning, (Bennett et al., 2018; Ellis & Goodyear, 2019). This exploratory case study aims to help reduce this difficulty by answering the question: What characteristics of orchestrations help to stretch the iron triangle? An LMS migration is an effective exploratory case for this research question since it is one of the most labour-intensive and complex projects undertaken by universities (Cottam, 2021). It is a project commonly undertaken with the aim of stretching the iron triangle. Using a socio-material perspective (Ellis & Goodyear, 2019; Fawns, 2022) and drawing on Dron’s (2022) definition of educational technology the poster examines three specific migration tasks: migrating lecture recordings; designing quality course sites; and, performing quality assurance checks. For each task, two different orchestrations – organized arrangements of actions, tools, methods, and processes (Dron, 2022) – are described and analysed. The institutional orchestrations developed by the central project organising the migration of an institution’s 4500+ courses, and the group orchestrations developed, due to perceived limitations of the institutional orchestrations, by a sub-group directly migrating 1700+ courses. Descriptions of the orchestrations are used to identify their effectiveness in sustainably and at scale satisfying diverse quality requirements - stretching the iron triangle. Analysis of these orchestrations identified three characteristics that are more likely to stretch the iron triangle: contextual digital augmentation; meso-level automation; and, generativity and adaptive reuse. Each of these characteristics, their presence in each orchestration, the relationships between these characteristics; linkages with existing literature and practice; and their observed impact on the iron triangle qualities is described. These descriptions are used to illustrate the very different assumptions underpinning the two sets of orchestrations. Differences in relationships evident in the orchestrations and which mirror the distinctions between ‘smooth users’ and ‘collective agency’ (Macgilchrist et al., 2020); and, industrial and convivial tools (Illich, 1973). The characteristics identified by this exploratory case study suggest that an approach that is less atomistic and industrial, and more collective and convivial may help reconnect people with educational technology more meaningfully and sustainably. Consequently this shift may also help increase higher education’s ability to maximise the accessibility, quality, and, cost efficiency of learning and teaching.

From Scarcity to Abundance: Illich’s Educational Critique and Indigenous Learning

This paper takes as a beginning point Ivan Illich’s radical work on education and schooling, which began with his posting to Puerto Rico as vice-rector of the Catholic University at Ponce, in Puerto Rico, in 1956. This work continued with the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC), in Cuernavaca, Mexico, through the publication of Deschooling Society (1971) and beyond. Three distinct phases in Illich’s conceptualization of schooling and education are traced. For the purpose of this paper, I will term them de-mythologizing, radical scrutinizing, and re-tooling). In the third phase, Illich and his colleague Edward Reimer posited that what is actually needed in reconsidering education is to improve human interaction with the tool of education. This insight formed part of Illich’s 1973 book, Tools for Conviviality, in which he explored what such a project might look like. In this paper, this idea is pushed further. I offer some stories of Teme Augama Anishinaabe Elders from Turtle Island (North America) with whom I have worked for several years, along with my reflections, to suggest an altogether different view of learning and education, one which takes place in a context of abundance.

Desarrollo de Herramientas de Educación Convivencial en el Siglo XXI

Ivan Illich famously coined the term «tools for conviviality» in which he refers to tools that encourage individual creativity and expression, and that can be adapted to people’s needs and situations. This paper describes the design of an interactive adaptable tool, whose applications include education and game play, and contextualizes it within Illich’s framework. The Collaborative Interactive Tabletop for Education (CITE), currently being developed at SUNY Polytechnic, allows users to manipulate digital information through the manipulation of hand-held tabletop objects. Such interfaces, known as Tangible User Interfaces (TUI), are believed to have significant advantages over traditional screen-based interfaces. For example, they have been shown to measurably increase collaborative behavior among users. However, TUIs have not been widely adopted, perhaps because most current TUI designs require some kind of specialized hardware. Our approach is to instead create a system, a set of verified instructions along with open-license software packages, for adapting any combination of standard computer hardware into a highly customizable interactive tabletop.

A convivial-agonistic framework to theorise public service media platforms and their governing systems

This article addresses the need to find alternative ways to envision, develop and govern public service media’s (PSM) online services and data-driven systems. By critically discussing both opportunities and shortcomings of how European PSM organisations developed their online services and personalisation systems, we argue that in their own platformisation processes, PSM have partially lost their distinctiveness and have not been able to provide viable alternatives to the dominant audiovisual media platforms. Thus, building on Mouffe’s agonistic theory and Illich’s conviviality theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework to radically rethink the guiding principles and rationales driving public service platforms, in order to develop viable alternatives to the currently dominant models. By doing so, we envision the development of such services as convivial tools that are based on three principles, namely, symmetry of power (intended as hackability, openness and algorithmic conviviality), independence and environmental sustainability.

A degrowth approach to urban mobility options: just, desirable and practical options

ABSTRACT Following Illich’s (1974) notion of convivial tools and the distinction he makes between “self-propelled transit” and “motorized transport” of mobility, we apply the emerging paradigm of degrowth to urban mobility. Based on the degrowth literature and Illich’s work, we derive principles and criteria for the mobility of a degrowth society that include institutional, energy and material use, infrastructure, local environmental impacts, social impacts and justice, proximity and speed, and autonomy. To ground our analysis in real-world conditions, we consider the practical perspective of mobility and add another set of criteria: comfort and safety, travel time, monetary cost, and health. We then compare urban mobility options, including recently developed hybrid mobility and sharing schemes. Our results show that, although private means have an advantage in terms of personal practicality, they are not desirable from a degrowth perspective, due to their high social and environmental costs and as constituting a source of urban injustice. Public, hybrid, and self-propelled mobility options would become more practical if such injustices were recognised, and if effective public policies challenged the radical monopoly of cars. Further, hybrid options and sharing/pooling schemes have the potential to reduce the use of private means for metropolitan mobility. The adoption of this degrowth framework can enrich debates on sustainable urban mobility and moves beyond the common proposition of promoting public transport as the solution.

A Family of Sensibilities: Toward a Relational Design Practice Grounded in Materiality and Embodiment

Beyond the industrial design origins of human-centered design, the empathic frame of design thinking, or the democratic convivial tools of co-design, there are nuanced practice considerations for the inter-relational, social practice of designers working with people. This paper specifically considers the affordances of materiality and the reflexive sense-making of embodiment within the sensorial, performative practice of design. This shared theme is explored through auto-ethnographic writing and a poetic line of inquiry that models a novel method for examining this social practice. Taking a reflective stance, the researchers resist the impulse to tidily package insights from six creative practice vignettes into a toolkit or diagram. Instead, the small moments enacted in the practice snapshots reveal a Family of Sensibilities. The collective set of attributes intentionally present a complicated, messy, interpretation of the familial elements that shape a designer’s material, embodied moves when in conversation with people and place.

Decolonizing, conviviality and convivial conservation: towards a convivial SDG 15, life on land?

In their article 'Towards convivial conservation' (2019), Büscher and Fletcher propose a vision for conservation which partly builds on Ivan Illich's 1973 book Tools for conviviality. Given a growing chorus of voices calling for decolonizing conservation to address the ramifications of racialized mindsets and biases,this article asks: what role could conviviality play in envisioning alternative, decolonizing conservation ideas, particularly for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15? The article first reflects on the case for decolonizing conservation. It then conducts an in-depth analysis of Illich's radical ideas as well as subsequent understandings of conviviality, before juxtaposing Illich's ideas with Büscher and Fletcher's suggestions through a decolonizing lens. Finally,the article reviews SDG 15, 'Life on Land', against the backdrop of the prior decolonizing and convivial perspectives. The article argues that Illich's conviviality and related ideas have much to offer in envisioning alternative, decolonizing conservation ideas by promoting grassroots, democratic decision-making, living within bounds by the rich, emphasizing interdependencies between and within people and the environment, yet need to avoid imposition and incorporate intergenerational and marginalized viewpoints adequately.

Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works

Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works

“I am an engineer and therefore a radical”: an interview with Lee Felsenstein, from Free Speech Movement technician to Homebrew Computer Club moderator

The following interview delves into Lee Felsenstein's upbringing in a bohemian communist family and his path as an engineer and technologist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He discusses his role as technician of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, co-creator of Community Memory and moderator of the Homebrew Computer Club. Felsenstein also shares his vision of “community”, “convivial tools” as defined by Ivan Illich and technology as an “invisible force”. He proves how his political activism has guided his technological creative process, making and sharing tools that will contribute to build convivial, open and informed communities.

Convivial Social Media Selves?

Computers were destined to be “connected” because their creators were created to be “connected.” While sociologists attempt to examine the self in relation to the phenomena of ever-connected social media platforms, theological insight can provide a transcendent teleology, a “directionality,” toward which such connectedness points. This essay draws on Ivan Illich’s vision for “convivial tools” for an interdisciplinary examination of the self in context of social media. Commercially designed, corporate-controlled social media platforms are not convivial tools by Illich’s definition, and cannot patch all existential wounds, but they can synthetically ameliorate the deepest longings of the human heart. Ultimately, social media selves hearken to a spiritual vision of a world where such alienation and brokenness are supplanted by personal and relational wholeness.