The past week has been no less than crazy for me and the entire Project IRIS team. From designing the overall presentation for hitting a moving target down to creating an unbelievable sales pitch, we all did the best we could have possibly done to bring home a deserved 3rd place in the Innovation Design category at the 2010 Ontario Engineering Competition.
We had structured the presentation to present the challenging issues and potential markets around three primary industrial applications. A competitive cost analysis was also presented to showcase the overall cost benefit of the system that we had designed. Much of this actually would not have been possible if we did not attend the 2009 Ontario Centers of Excellence Discovery conference last year to talk with businesses and organizations.
As the in-house design domain expert, I made a series of new posters and new presentation templates to jazz up our message. This 80’s IBM-inspired poster below was made quickly late Wednesday night and printed on a large poster measuring 36″ by 72″. We expected the visitors to our display booth to be less interested in the technical aspect so we focused on the useful aspects of our capsule and the potential businesses it could draw.
Throughout the competition, the team ran into a number of challenging technical issues beyond our control including but not limited to booth power failures. That did not stop us from working with what we had in hand to impress the visitors and the judges to come out on top of several other teams. Good job team!
As a side note, one disappointing incident did occur at the closing awards banquet when the award presenter called out Carleton as the 1st place winner of the Senior Design category (a very intense and technically challenging competition category with the highest number of teams) only to realize a mistake was made when the coordinators stripped away the awards as the Carleton team made it to the stage. The presenter then proceeded to call out Laurentian University as the winner, and then said “Just kidding, Carleton!” The Carleton team then again turned around to head back to the stage only to be found fooled again when Laurentian University was again called out as the winner. To add insult to injury, the host of the banquet further joked on the matter after the award has been presented to Laurentian. The EngSoc members on the OEC committee should be greatly embarrassed for this completely inconsiderate behaviour which negatively impacts the image of our school as the host of the competition.