Can a product become successful by winning the praise of some users, but at the same time keep a low profile to the majority of people who interact with it? Gaylord Archival looked to Nexus for help to develop a museum display case system that embodied these divergent qualities. Gaylord wanted to develop their own proprietary system for lower cost, scalable, semi-permanent display cases. These cases would be constructed primarily from aluminum extrusions and acrylic panels.

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The market for such products was dominated at the time by a display case system from Europe. With a modular design that offered maximum visibility, as well as being highly scalable, the existing system's extreme flexibility was achieved by sacrificing ease of fabrication, ease of assembly and also ease of maintenance by museum staff. The challenge was to create a system with more balanced levels of access - visibility and scalability that is ideal for museum patrons but also served the technical needs of a museum's curatorial team.

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For the duration of the project, Nexus assumed full product design responsibilities, while consulting closely with Gaylord's product, sales, and manufacturing teams to ensure that steady progress was serving all stakeholders.

 

The goal, however, of maintaining the project’s pace was periodically threatened by extremely long, pandemic-induced lead times for custom aluminum extrusions, which was a key structural element to the system. With the wait for samples of new extrusion designs extending to many months, a much greater impotence was placed on early, "breadboard" prototyping to validate essential design concepts. The design of many essential structural components needed to be tested and revised rapidly so that final versions could be released for tooling.

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Even with the added time pressure, Nexus succeeded in incorporating intuitive mechanical features, including snap-together magnetic interlocks between case panels that improved single-person maintenance access. The interlocks, comprised of a mix of magnets and traditional security screws are part of a preassembled corner structure to each acrylic panel, which greatly simplifies initial case assembly. All new features were designed with maximum viewability of case contents as a priority. The aluminum elements were thus minimized to the limits of necessary structural and mechanical performance. 

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This balancing act resulted in a case system design that is remarkable for the institutions using AXS to display artifacts but is successfully unobtrusive for the patrons that can easily look beyond to what is preserved inside.