Duotone Mag 2024

R & D Photos Toby Bromwich, Daniel Deak Bardos, Fishbowldiaries Copy  Bernd Zerelles, Toby Bromwich, Laura Alexy MAUI EXPERIENCE & MUNICH ENGINEERING Design roots on Maui and ‘Made in Germany’ engineering. Personalities with decades of experience in the Maui water sports nucleus and a new generation of engineers and developers at the Boards & More headquarters in Munich. Duotone R&D is team play. Change is progress. The research and development process has changed more than almost anything else in our sports over the past 20 years. Just two decades ago, the formative factor in development was a board shaper or sail or kite designer who gave shape to ideas. But then digitalization changed all of our lives – and also the development of Duotone products. Thanks to the new communication possibilities, all Duotone developers and production facilities are now networked in real time. Products are designed digitally on the computer, discussed in video conferences and data files are exchanged worldwide. Collaboration between Maui, Munich and production in Sri Lanka has become so much closer, faster and better. Of course, development has also become much more complex in recent years. Calculations and simulations are carried out on the computer for all products, board and sail, kite and bar, wing and foil. The proportion of engineering in development has increased, while manual work has decreased. Prototyping has also shifted. Whereas prototypes used to be built by hand on Maui, they are now manufactured in the production facilities – and are therefore much, much closer to the final product at an early stage. And finally, a very important component of the more recent development period: materials sourcing. Material innovations have become much more important for decisive improvements. New materials make new designs possible. But using new materials requires an understanding of these materials. And this understanding does not happen on the product itself through trial and error, but in advance in the laboratory: what are the mechanical properties of the respective materials, how can we process them – and finally, in which product and where do they make sense? This database is incredibly important, because the great art is to know how a material influences a shape. This is how the findings from the Boards & More laboratory are put into practice and the designers work with this data on the product. As always in all processes, people are the decisive factor. Kite, wing, sail and board designers on Maui stand for their decades of experience – decades of development work for Duotone – their incomparable intuition and their pulse on the times in this water sports nucleus of Hawaii. At its headquarters in Munich, Boards & More not only bundles laboratory data and patents, but also the development expertise of just under a dozen engineers, which is probably unique in the wind and wave board sports industry. A team of developers with very individual skills, each of whom stands for crossover know-how transfer. Kiteboarding inspires Wing Foiling, Wing Foiling inspires Windsurfing, Windsurfing inspires the development of Wing Foil boards, Wing Foiling inspires innovations in Prone Foiling. Process engineering, material innovations, processing, testing methods, design ideas – at the Boards & More R&D team everything is shared across all disciplines. This creates a melting pot in development that raises equipment for the sports of Kiteboarding, Windsurfing, Wing Foiling to a level that even we hardly thought possible a few years ago. The competencies from all sports lead to a common great strength. We are one family, under one brand umbrella – and we all pull together. To create outstanding material for our customers. D U O T O N E 83 R & D T E A M D U O T O N E 82 W H Y