Milking the Rhino - Innovative Solutions Showcase: Promoting ethics education, user-centered design and social entrepreneurship in the global context

Abstract

Milking the Rhino is an award-winning documentary that examines environmental conservation from the perspective of people who live in the midst of wildlife, and offers a complex, intimate portrait of two community-based conservation efforts in Kenya and Namibia. Penn State University developed and hosted a competition called Milking the Rhino: Innovative Solutions Showcase inviting students to develop appropriate, innovative and sustainable strategies to empower African indigenous communities to leverage natural resources for their self-determined development. The showcase was created for students from all majors as a venue to foster critical thinking about sustainable community development, indigenous communities' self-determination, and the role technology in enabling new solutions to global inequities. This paper discusses the rationale and mechanics of the showcase, the key ethical issues that the teams grappled with, the solutions developed by the students, and (focus group) assessment results on the educational impact of the competition. Overall, the competition was successful in bringing compelling ethical design issues in the global arena into the classroom. Based on the success of the competition over two years, the feasibility of expanding it to a national competition is being assessed. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.