Work on a development project in Guatemala from the comfort of your own home in this new Spring 2021 course: HEST 444/544 "Co-Design for Development: A Remote Collaborative Experience"
Throughout this project-based course, students in multidisciplinary teams will collaborate remotely with a group of local innovators from an indigenous community in Santa Catarina Palopo, Guatemala to develop sustainable solutions that address some of their current challenges. Link4, a Guatemala-based social enterprise that fosters local innovation and sustainable development through design, capacity building and social impact experiences, will facilitate these collaborations. As the multicultural teams proceed through the design process, students and local innovators will gather and process information to understand the context of user needs, explore ideation methods to generate ideas and design proposals, prototype, test and gather feedback and develop an implementation plan. Final deliverables will consist of a prototype and implementation plan.
The course will be offered on Fridays from 2-3:50 pm Spring 2021 term and is open for registration now. It will be co-taught via zoom by Dr. Nordica MacCarty from the mechanical and humanitarian engineering programs, Julie Walkin from OSU Global Opportunities, and Omar Crespo and the team from Link4. The the course is sponsored by OSU’s Office of Global Affairs and Dr. Kendra Sharp’s Richard and Gretchen Evans Professorship in Humanitarian Engineering.
Students interested in this course are invited to initiate an Office of Global Opportunities (OSU GO) program application using your ONID. Completing this application is not required but is useful for planning purposes. Please indicate your interest (initiate your OSU GO application) by March 15, 2021.
Students Completing the Humanitarian Engineering Minor: While the course will be only 2 credits, you have a variety of options for that extra 1 credit to fulfill the minor requirements. We can approve a substitution that would allow you to count 1 credit of a 4-credit thematic elective towards the more HEST-specific portion of the requirements. Some of the “thematic electives” – general anthropology, social science, public health, etc. will be 4 credits. Or you could take a relevant Honors colloquium or other 1-credit course that is related. Please contact Dr. Nordica MacCarty to discuss.
