Why Foundations Matter
Digital systems are never neutral. They encode assumptions about what matters, who counts, and how decisions are made. Health systems, in particular, reflect deep political, economic, and epistemic choices. At Convivens Lab, we make these choices explicit. Not to moralize them, but to design them responsibly.
Our work is grounded in a set of conceptual lenses that shape how we define problems, design infrastructures, and evaluate impact. These are not decorative references. They are operational constraints.
Core Lenses
Conviviality
Technologies should increase people's autonomy, not their dependence. A convivial system enables users to understand, modify, and appropriate it. Tools become oppressive when they can only be operated by specialists or when they impose a single way of being used.
Operational implication
We prioritize systems that can be governed, adapted, and audited by those who use them. We design for appropriation, not just usability.
Pharmakon
Every technology is both remedy and poison. What helps can also harm. The same system that enables care can also enable surveillance; the same data that supports research can also be weaponized. There is no technological innocence.
Operational implication
We embed continuous evaluation and contestability into our systems. We design for harm mitigation from the start, not as an afterthought.
Political Economy of Technology
Technologies shape power relations. They redistribute agency, visibility, and control. Who builds, who owns, who governs, and who profits from a system matters as much as what the system does. Technology is never neutral; it always serves interests.
Operational implication
We analyze who gains and who loses from a system before deploying it. We design governance structures that distribute power, not concentrate it.
Hegemony and Institutions
What appears as "normal" is often the result of institutional sedimentation. Categories, standards, and workflows encode historical power relations. Reform is possible, but requires understanding how the current order came to be and whose interests it serves.
Operational implication
We design infrastructures that can evolve without locking in injustice. We question inherited categories and standards rather than reproducing them.
Health as Commons
Health is not a commodity. It is a shared condition that depends on collective infrastructures, knowledge, and solidarity. Treating health as a private good to be purchased leads to systematic exclusion and inequality.
Operational implication
We avoid extractive data models and prioritize collective governance. We design for public benefit, not private capture.
Public Action
Democratic participation requires spaces where people can appear to each other as equals, deliberate, and act together. Digital systems can enable or foreclose such spaces. Infrastructure is political in this fundamental sense.
Operational implication
We design systems that enable deliberation, contestation, and collective decision-making. We avoid systems that reduce participation to data extraction.
Semantic Justice
Language shapes thought and action. Categories, classifications, and naming conventions encode assumptions about who and what matters. Semantic choices have material consequences for visibility, access, and recognition.
Operational implication
We pay close attention to naming, categorization, and classification. We involve affected communities in defining the terms that will describe them.
Why This Matters in Practice
These lenses influence how we choose partners, how we design data governance, how we define metrics, and how we evaluate success.
Specifically, these lenses influence:
- How we select and evaluate potential partners
- How we design data governance structures
- Which metrics we prioritize and which we reject
- How we define success and failure
- What design constraints we impose on ourselves
A Note on References
These lenses draw on intellectual traditions associated with thinkers such as Illich (conviviality), Stiegler (pharmakon), Ellul and Graeber (political economy of technology), Gramsci (hegemony), Mauss and Kropotkin (commons and gift), Arendt (public action), and Chomsky (language and power).
We do not cite these references as authority appeals. We translate their insights into design constraints, governance principles, and evaluation criteria. The test of a good foundation is not whether it sounds impressive, but whether it produces better systems.