Convivial design heuristics for software systems

Illich's notion of conviviality centres on the balance between individual freedom to act and collective freedom from domination. This balance, or tension, is present in the design of most user-facing computer systems, and especially in the design of programming systems. Software lore has arisen with at best a skewed perspective on such issues, having developed from an industrial viewpoint. In this paper I survey some tentative design principles, extracted from examples of research work or (more often) systems used in practice, which (sometimes by accident) do show some regard for conviviality. Although preliminary, my hope is that these principles may yet develop into a collection of design hints at least equal, and largely countervailing, to the less conviviality-prone ideas circulating in today's software folklore. Relevant topics include language design, information hiding, language virtual machines, portability, classical logic, and layered system design. I also briefly consider the intertwined social and political constructs, such as copyleft, ownership and community responsibility, asking how to evolve or generalise these towards convivial ends.