This paper contributes to the development of an under-utilized area of focus for CSCW research and design: history. The design and evaluation of technology, as practiced in the field, has positioned CSCW as a largely forward-looking community. The enduring "presentism' and lack of historical view threatens to leave out a wealth of resources that can inspire design, support comparative analysis, and develop a deeper understanding of technology development and its social consequences. This paper argues that a historicist sensibility should inform the due diligence of all CSCW research, and we present connection points for the various ways in which historical research might more deeply inform CSCW, while offering a selection of historiographic challenges to sensitize CSCW scholars as we seek to better situate our collective work within both the present moment as well as ongoing temporal change.

Workers are increasingly expected to take on the responsibility and effort of preparing for employment in the new economy, where digital technologies play a central role in bridging access to resources, connections, and opportunity. Drawing from multi-year studies of entrepreneurs in Accra and Detroit, two cities that continue to experience high rates of inequality and persistently low incomes for the majority of their residents, this article highlights three key challenges to self-entrepreneurialization in the digital age: self-upgrading, maintaining technology, and overcoming exclusion. Locating these challenges at the intersection of (1) two powerful global discourses of entrepreneurialism and technology upgrade and (2) class frictions and racial dynamics, this paper uncovers ways in which CSCW might support entrepreneurialism in the new economy, particularly given that it is becoming a de facto space of work and mode of living.

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.

From statistics and mapping to engineering and medicine, technology has long been a tool of governance, shaping how nation states control their own and other regions' populations and natural resources. More recently, a nation's capacity to cultivate citizens as tech innovators and entrepreneurs is considered an indicator of its economic prosperity and global power. We show how this turn towards innovation and entrepreneurship is central to how technological and political elites tinker with new modes of governance and define the relationship between the future of the nation and its citizenry in economic terms. Drawing from long-term multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, China, and Africa, we present a subset of findings to show how these shifts in governance are being enacted through interconnections between politicians and technologists, and the products, spaces, and educational ideals they fund and create. We argue that making sense of these shifts in governance is essential for current and future CSCW scholarship as they intersect with issues of power within social computing.

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.