Abstract:

Panels are a way to get information from people on a repetitive basis. In the authors’ sequence of three classes on Design Thinking for Social Product Innovation panels are used to contact people who are one of the following:
- Live in country
- Knowledgeable about the country
- Expert on the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal being pursued
- Technical expert as in medical, water filtration, solar power etc.

In this class each student picks one or more of the 17 UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals and a country that is at the base or below the 50% line of the countries on the world economic pyramid. They work to empathize with the situation in country and understand the problem in local terms.

The first semester students try to begin to understand the country and the goal through empathy. The concluding piece is the problem as it is seen in country. Students are encouraged in the first course to begin to develop an international panel. The class learns about many ways to do this and some basic applications such as What’s App, and global social media. They learn that they will be expected to have 25 panel members after winter break.

As the second course begins and students are beginning to ideate some possible solutions for the problems studied in class 1, the panel becomes important. Each student develops over fifty ideas and then distills those down to 4 to six which they send out to panel members for their input, by this time having in country panel members is critical.

Technology is helping as it improves year by year. A few years ago, finding potential panel members was difficult. Today, the search systems are better, and you can search in one language but find people all over the world. Second the translation software is much better so students can put things into different languages with ease and lots of caution. Today high proportion of people have smart phones and apps like WhatsApp that ease the communication. As infrastructure, hardware and software develop students should be able to have better and more fluid contact with the villagers that they are working with, wherever they may be.

Panel members are asked to critique three things for the students.
- Ideas
- Concepts
- Models

The critique may be qualitative or quantitative. Sometimes students send out a quantitative survey based on the engineering of a concept only to find out that panel members in country do not see a need for their product. The authors students are freshmen in the Honors College and usually start out quite naïve about life beyond their own community.

Like going on international study spending time communicating with others in a very different situation often opens the minds of students to see the world differently. It is hard to learn about the difficult lives of others when you are quite comfortable. Some but not all students really work at communication across the borders and in so doing learn a lot about the world around them.

Challenges and Opportunities:
There are many challenges and opportunities to using panels. One opportunity is that each year it gets easier and easier to work as the technology and software improve. It is always a challenge to get the students to realize that this is much more than an assignment, it is an opportunity to learn about another country, culture, and way of life. It is an opportunity to develop new perspectives, new understandings of cultures, languages and lifestyles.

Keywords:

Panels, Design Thinking, Problem Based Learning, Globalization Culture.