Electronics Protection - Fall 2015 - (Page 18)

Feature Innovation Demands That You Break the Rules Robert Cox, Vice President, Marketing OKW Enclosures, Inc. True innovation takes courage. It means casting off the lifelines that others cling to so desperately. Those supremely powerful words "what if" are less likely to be uttered if designers first reach for their rulebook. If disruptive innovation is the key to business success in the 21st century, then it is obvious that a few sacred cows may have to pay the price. In short, electronics manufacturers will need to look long and hard at how they tackle their next project - and whether much-loved design rules created to assist them are instead holding them back. You could argue that truly smart designers will not be pondering to themselves "which design rules should we break?" Instead they will simply ask: "Rules? What rules?" Trouble is, some of those design rules sprang up for entirely logical reasons to prevent expensive errors of the past being repeated. Ignoring all the design rules in the hope that blue sky thinking will flourish more readily is courage bordering on the foolhardy. Your accountants will be very nervous. It's all about knowing which aspects of design reality to bend and by how much. Much like Neo in The Matrix. Easy if you're a start-up with no market preconceptions that need to be met. Not so easy if you're a trusted manufacturer; customers love your existing products and expect more of the same. This is the big dilemma confronting manufacturers of standard electronic enclosures - or rather part of the dilemma. The biggest challenge that standard enclosure manufacturers face is that their cases should enhance the products they house but not be recognizable in their own right. "No designer will want to specify a standard enclosure if it's obviously the same one their competitor is using," said Robert Cox, vice president of marketing at plastic enclosures manufacturer OKW. This rule is absolutely fundamental to OKW, a strict principle that underpins all its design rules. And yet OKW avoids being corralled and constrained by this; winning six international design awards in the process. How? Simple, by breaking a few design rules that others have chosen to follow a little too slavishly. OKW won its latest iF Product Design for Synergy - a range of 36 square, rectangular, oval and round enclosures for high end domestic and office electronics. Synergy enclosures are a huge departure for OKW, and not just because they are the company's first to combine aluminum and plastic. This in itself is a huge deal for a brand that has always been absolutely rooted in the plastic enclosures market - but that's not the kicker. The real rule-busting here is that the OKW has broken a longheld tradition in extruded enclosures: it has extruded vertically instead of horizontally. That has led to a unique connector-based construction system with concealed fixings. Enclosure footprints are smaller; custom sizes are easier to specify. 18 Fall 2015 * www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com OKW also broke another of its own rules. Instead of going it alone, the company brought in a European partner to help provide Synergy's luxury finish (which involves blasting the cases with glass beads). "We wanted to create something that was totally different to everything else in the market," said Cox. "Yes, we manufacture metal enclosures through our MetCase brand but they are either rack mount enclosures for data centers or aluminum cases for industrial applications." Synergy enclosures and MetCase Combimet rack cases are both manufactured from aluminum and both have been designed to enable faster and easier customization. But that's where the similarity ends. Synergy enclosures are for high end home and office electronics and so sit more comfortably in the OKW suite of products." Synergy is not the first time that OKW has turned the enclosures market on its head. Remember that rule about enclosures being attractive but not "too distinctive"? Two years ago OKW absolutely torched the design rulebook with its radical range of Blob enclosures. Like Synergy, Blob won an iF Product Design Award. While Synergy is understated, the Blob range is like no enclosure you've ever seen before. There are three weird amorphous shapes in the all-plastic Blob range,and two of them are asymmetrical. That's another major design rule smacked clean out of the ballpark. "Blob cases can look very strange if you've never seen one before but we chose those shapes for important and practical reasons," said Cox. "They have been ergonomically designed to guide the user's hands to the controls. Their curves make them highly tactile and incredibly intuitive to use. But there are still enough flat surfaces to mount large membrane keypads, connectors and cable glands." Wasn't it just a little scary going with a design that was so idiosyncratic for a standard enclosure? "Up to a point. It was never simply a leap of faith - rotate any Blob enclosure in your hands and you'll see that it can be used any way up. That in itself creates differentiation between potential applications." "Also, these days it is much easier to customize enclosures with different colors, cutouts and digital printing. So it doesn't take many steps to make a BLOB-housed medical device look totally different to a Blob-housed industrial machine controller." Not content with breaking all those design rules, OKW also decided to shred a few more conventions. It's a fact that most plastic enclosures will be used in domestic, office or light industrial environments. Despite the ever widening range of plastics available, the electronic enclosures industry has generally pigeonholed its cases on the basis of materials: plastic for indoors, metal for outdoors. There are many plastic handheld cases out there and a number of metal handheld cases, but what if you need an enclosure for use in cold climates? http://www.ElectronicsProtectionMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Electronics Protection - Fall 2015

Electronics Protection - Fall 2015
Contents
Editor's Choice
Beat the Heat: Six Best Practices for Protecting Your People and Your Business from Arc Flash Hazards
Data Center Design and Cooling for Sensitive Electronics
Electronic Access Solutions - Design Considerations for Your Data Center
An Unsung Hero: the Gas Discharge Tube
Innovation Demands That You Break the Rules
Enclosures
Thermal
Power
Hardware
Industry News
Calendar of Events

Electronics Protection - Fall 2015