A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
It's an Ergonomic Life
Editors tend to be punctilious about matters of language, and while I don't share the fundamentalist views of some of my colleagues, I do have my pet peeves. One that came to mind recently as I was reading about the Medical Design Excellence Awards program that was announced in the October issue of EMDM is the way in which a technical term can suddenly come into vogue with mainstream media. Almost immediately, linguistic erosion sets in and the substantive meaning of the word is gradually diluted.
Take ergonomics. Please. From fountain pens to camcorders, everything we use in our daily lives has been scrutinized--or so the advertising copywriters would have us believe--by a resident ergonomist. I recently acquired a new desk chair for my office with so many ergonomic enhancements that it came with an explicatory CD-ROM.
Kent Ritzel, medical section chair of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and director of Metaphase Design Group (St. Louis, MO, USA), calls the trend ergomania. "People think that if they understand the size of a person's hand for a handheld product, then they can call it an ergonomic product," says Ritzel. He explains that the science of ergonomics extends beyond the traditional measure of body parts that originated with the US military's WWII efforts to fit equipment to soldiers. "It involves a more dynamic situation of understanding how [the product and the user interact] throughout the entire process of use."
Ergonomics is but one aspect of product design that will be considered as judges sift through submissions for the Medical Design Excellence Awards. The awards are sponsored by EMDM's publisher, Canon Communications llc, and were created in collaboration with IDSA, which administers the program and oversees the judging.
Spurious promises of ergonomic design, inflated claims of a revolutionary new technology, and sundry other staples of advertising copy will have no sway with the judging panel convened by IDSA. Rather, the industry experts will evaluate entries based on their innovation, functional improvement, and business impact in two categories: finished medical devices, and components and materials intended for medical applications. "This program will reward the designers and manufacturers of products that are improving health-care delivery, reducing the cost of developing and manufacturing devices, and advancing the state of the art," explains program director Amy Allen.
In addition to singling out past achievements, organizers hope that the awards will have a prospective impact as well, notes Ritzel, by showing successful examples of product development in an industry that must operate within a complex regulatory environment. "The program will be a valuable educational vehicle that should help companies to improve their competitiveness," he says. "As a result, it will foster development of better products by encouraging investment in high-quality design and engineering."
For more information about the Medical Design Excellence Awards and how to submit your product, turn to page 60. The winners will be announced at the Medical Design & Manufacturing (MD&M) East 98 Conference and Exposition in New York City 24 June, where a gala awards dinner will be held in their honor. The finalists will also receive a stunning pyramid-shaped statue. I'm told that aesthetics was the key factor in choosing the pyramid, and that ergonomic considerations never actually came up during the discussion.
How refreshing.
