An Industry Award for a Project That Nearly Was Not

Boston Scientific Galway nominated our XR design review project for the ITAG Excellence Awards, and on Friday night it won its category. I went to Galway in a borrowed dinner jacket, having learned what black tie meant about a week earlier.

Worth being clear about whose award this is. ITAG recognises the company and the project, not the researcher, and the people on that stage carried it through their own organisation: getting laptops past IT policy, finding rooms, persuading colleagues to put a headset on. My part was the workflow and the evidence.

What makes it satisfying is the shape of the year before it. This project was originally scoped around ergonomic testing of manual workstations. Several months of device benchmarking and on-site observation later it was clear that ergonomic testing did not happen often enough to justify the investment, and that the recurring pain was somewhere else entirely: design reviews of equipment that does not exist yet.

Re-scoping a funded industry project in month five is uncomfortable. You are effectively telling the people paying for it that the thing they asked for is the wrong thing. The reason it worked was that by then I had spent enough time on site to point at what they actually did all week.

A nomination is also a useful forcing function. It meant presenting the work to an external panel, in their format, at short notice, which is very different to presenting it to supervisors. Everything I could not explain in two minutes turned out to be something I did not understand well enough yet.