‘Tools for conviviality’ is a construct put to work by Ivan Illich, which promotes the principle of vernacular knowing in communities.
The construct helpful in re-approaching the practice of designing and mobilisjng actual tools: technologies, machineries, tool infrastructures and collections, constellations of software and code.
However, the construct more fundamentally references (politicised alternatives to) major **institutions** in Fordist and post-Fordist societies, that are staffed (and steered) by members of the professional-managerial class.
Such institutions often take the form of bureaucracies and frequently are articulated with elements of the State, such that they become mandatory frames for the provision of basic means of subsistence and (more likely) wellbeing - for example, social care, education and information, medical care.
Historical processes of expropriation, enclosure and professionalisation of such cultural-economic functions are, for example, documented in Ehrenreich & English 1979, *For her own good : 150 years of the experts' advice to women*.
# Vernacular practices These mandatory, expert-mediated and limited-access frames of provision are juxtaposed by Illich with vernacular practices, distributed through entire populations and propagated within the mundane cultural practices and spaces of everyday collaborative mutualised life and work. As, for example, advocated in Ivan Illich 1970 *Deschooling society*, and 1973 *Tools for conviviality*. Ivan Illich > “I have no expectations from technology, but I believe in the beauty, in the creativity, in the surprising inventiveness of people,and I continue to hope in them.” Ivan Illich (Cayley (ed) 1992, *Ivan Illich in Conversation*, Ontario.:111) Vernacular practices
# Commentary
- David Bollier 2011, Ivan Illich and the Enclosure of Vernacular Domains, blog 
- wikipedia “Conviviality, or Convivialism, is the ability of individuals to interact creatively and autonomously with others and their environment to satisfy their own needs. This interpretation is related to, but distinct from, several synonyms and cognates, including in French the enjoyment of the social company of others (convivialité), Catalan social cohesion policy (Convivència), and its contemporary understanding in English of living together with difference and diversity.
"This interpretation was introduced by Ivan Illich as a direct contrast to industrial productivity that produces consumers that are alienated from the way that things are produced. Its [ambiguous] focus on joyful simple living, the localisation of production systems, links to Marxist economics, and Illich’s simultaneous criticism of overconsumption have resulted in conviviality being taken up by a range of academic and social movements, including as a pillar of degrowth theory and practice“
- Littler 2021 - *Illich, Conviviality, and Computational Kingdoms* webpage
- Marianne Gronemeyer 2016, ‘Conviviality’, *Resilience*, webpage . Originally published in Bollier & Helfrich 2015 *Patterns of Commoning*.