第1章コンピューターサイエンス入門

Many products and companies offer services or products over the Internet. While online shopping provides additional sales opportunities for businesses, while offering consumers a convenient shopping option, it is not without risks. For example, online businesses and their shoppers may be victims of data breaches and identity theft. Other risks include fake reviews that motivate consumers to make a purchase, phishing that leads to hacking, and fake online stores that take consumers’ money without delivering a product. What can we do to mitigate the risks and dangers of online shopping?

Addressing these risks is not as simple as practicing humility and including communities in the design process. Many challenges in computing for global development are sociopolitical or technopolitical rather than purely technical. For example, carrying out a pilot test to evaluate the effectiveness of a design can appear as favoritism toward the pilot group participants. These issues and social tensions are especially exacerbated in the Global South, where the legacies of imperialism and racial hierarchies continue to produce or expand social inequities and injustices.

The identities of people creating computer technologies for global development are ultimately just as important as the technologies they create. In Design Justice, Sasha Costanza-Chock reiterates the call for computer scientists to “build with, not for,” the communities they wish to improve. In this way, Design Justice seeks to address the social justice tensions raised when asking the question, “Who does technology ultimately benefit?” by centering the ingenuity of the marginalized “user” rather than the dominant “designer.”

In some cases, underdeveloped countries can quickly catch up without spending the money that was invested to develop the original technologies. For example, we can set up ad hoc networks quickly today and at a portion of the cost in Middle Eastern and African countries using technology that was developed (at a high cost) in the United States and Europe over the past several decades. This means that sometimes, progress in one part of the world can be shared with another part of the world, enabling that area to quickly progress and advance technologically.

The Design Justice Network (https://openstax.org/r/76DesignJust) is an organization that aims to advance the principles of design justice and to include people who are marginalized in the technology design process.