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Platform labor and gig work have become key sites for understanding a nascent future of work hallmarked by informalization and digitization. A growing body of research emphasizes how experiences of platform work are mediated not only by algorithms and user interfaces, but also by gender, race, local cultures as well as labor hierarchies. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research on the digital transformation of healthcare, we show how therapists' experiences of platform labor are centrally shaped by the historical and ongoing feminization of mental health work. Platforms reinscribe feminized labor conditions that are pervasive in the healthcare industry, and yet platform labor appears as 'useful' to some therapists as they navigate a set of precarious career choices fundamentally structured by feminization. We use the analytic of the stopgap to describe platforms' two-fold reproduction of the status quo: first by offering an approximation of freedom to individual workers, helping to forestall a crisis of unsustainable work conditions; and second by reinscribing the same logics of exploitation in order to make labor scalable. This stopgap analytic reorients the focus away from the impact of the platforms technologies as such, towards the conditions that make stopgap solutions necessary for survival. It also points towards the importance of intervening in the conditions of exclusion and exploitation that help to create a market for platform stopgaps. 

This paper turns to one of HCI’s central value systems, i.e. its commitments to usefulness and the ideal that technology enables social progress, productivity, and excellence. Specifically, we examine how the seemingly “positive” ideal to make technology “useful” – i.e. to build systems and devices that advance social and technological progress – masks various forms of violence and injustice such as colonial othering, racist exclusions, and exploitation. Drawing from ethnographic research, we show how design and computing methods from design thinking to agile theory and entrepreneurial approaches in tech production and higher education are the latest techniques in the cultivation of useful bodies on behalf of the state, the corporation, the university, and the economy. Aligning with feminist, critical race and critical computing commitments, this paper offers a genealogical approach to show how injustice and violence endure, despite and because of a narrative of progress and positive change. 

Through their combination of lifestyle and method, Silicon Valley models for tech production such as design thinking, startup incubators, lean management, etc. are spreading across the globe. These paradigms are positioned by product designers, politicians, investors and corporations alike as replicable routes to individual and national empowerment. They are portrayed as universal templates, portable across national borders and applicable to local needs. We draw from our ethnographic engagements with tech entrepreneurial efforts in Ghana, China, and Jamaica to unpack the stakes involved in their uptake, showing that while local actors produce situated alternatives, their work nevertheless often results in a continued valorization of these seemingly universal methods. We argue that design methods shape not only use practices, but have consequences for the life worlds of professional designers. This includes how they impact personal and national identities, confer legitimacy in transnational innovation circles, and secure access to social and economic resources. Ultimately, we call for an inclusion of these factors in ongoing conversations about design and design methods. 

HCI shapes in important ways dominant notions of what counts as innovation and where (good) design is located. In this paper, we argue for the continuous expansion of the body of critical and reflexive work that asks both researcher and designer to reflect on their values of design in the world. Drawing from ethnographic research in Accra, Ghana and Shenzhen, China, we illustrate how design is as much about making artifacts as it is about producing national identity, reputation, and economic gain. Technology entrepreneurs take from and resist the discourse of their cities as emerging sites of Silicon-Valley type innovation. They render the narrative of “catching up with the west” overly simplistic, ahistorical and blind to situated practices of design. This view, we argue, is critical for interrogating our views of design especially as it becomes more central in the contemporary global economy.