I used to have a car that spent a fair amount of time in the shop. During servicing I'd routinely ignore the NO CUSTOMERS BEYOND THIS POINT sign and walk into the garage to talk to the mechanic. Not because I cared about the car--I just liked looking at the garage's tool carts, which seemed to hold and organize an insane amount of tools and attachments.

I finally found the site of the company that makes those things: Montezuma Manufacturing. They make portable toolboxes, rolling cabinets and the chests that go on top, in both steel and aluminum. Their capacity and price--the large black cabinet pictured above rings in at $2,300, which is worth more than my car was--put these out of reach of the casual DIY-er, but it's interesting to see how the pros store their stuff.

In association with Judd Foundation, design gallery Sebastian + Barquet is presenting Donald Judd: Furniture, an exhibition of Donald Judd's resolved furniture designs. Shown alongside Judd's original drawings, this exhibition will include important early examples of his furniture in a variety of woods, colored-plywood, enameled aluminum and copper.

Donald Judd: Furniture
Sebastian and Barquet, New York City
November 12-December 25th, 2009
Opening: Thursday, November 12th. 6-9 pm

Renault has developed a website to promote sustainable development and educate the public on its various facets, reports Dexigner.

The site looks at new concepts such as car-sharing, multi-modality, new behaviours, and "soft" mobility.

The aim of Sustainable Mobility is to offer a complete panorama of the studies and initiatives undertaken worldwide on the mobility of the future.

>> Read article

The Xtend & Climb ladder seems to be a neat alternative, as it stretches from 2 1/2 feet in storage to 12 1/2 feet in height.

It's made from aircraft aluminum with steel connectors and it needn't be unfurled all the way to be used; just "pop" up as many steps as you need into their locking positions. I'm thinking about picking one up, and if I do, an in-depth review will follow.

Israeli designer Alex Padwa has his students at Shenkar's College of Engineering and Design not only sketch, but learn to juggle--literally, with three balls--in "freeing the mind" exercises prior to beginning design projects. Padwa's class' latest was to design a tea kettle that breaks away from the conventions. Hit the jump to see some of our faves, large.

Brief: The redesign of the AFH Chicago Logo is a competition for 'branding' the Chicago Chapter with a new logo that will be used on all items issued by AFH Chicago. This is an open call for a logo that will represent the broader Architecture for Humanity Organization but a logo that also represents that this is a local chapter that is recognizable as a distinct chapter focused on local issues as well as the larger goals of the national organization.

Logo Competition Submission Requirements + Timeline
I. The entry should be submitted in e-mail format as a high resolution PDF file, JPG or TIF, not to exceed 8.5x11, no later than Monday, November 16th by 5:00 p.m. to logocomp [at] afh-chicago [dot] org.

II. The entries can be hand sketches, line drawings; full color imagery...anything that gets the idea across the design does not have to be the finish product as long as the idea for the logo is conveyed.

III. All entries received will be voted on at the November AFH Chicago monthly meeting and the top five (5) vote receiving logos will be forwarded to the national chapter with the winning design selected by the staff at the national headquarters.

IV. The author(s) of the winning design will be asked to work with the 'board' to apply the logo to the website, stationary, business cards, etc.

V. With your e-mail please state the name(s) of all entrants, your contact information and the best means and time to be contacted.

Email logocomp [at] afh-chicago [dot] org for more information.

Deadline: November 16th, 5:00pm CST

We're excited to announce the brand new, just-launched web magazine Sight Unseen, which "takes readers inside the worlds of design, art, fashion, food, photography and other creative disciplines." Compiled by editors Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer, the interviews, studio visits, book excerpts, factory tours, sketchbook highlights, and design flashbacks reveal all the thinking, hard work and discoveries behind a vibrant, pluralistic and international creative scene.

For example, Khemsurov's piece "Sissel Tolaas, Scent Expert," visits Tolaas in her Berlin studio, where she develops complex scents for museums, big brands, and her own artwork. An excerpt:

Though on any given day she might be busy developing an ambient odor for a Margiela exhibition or identifying a prototypical Swedish smell for Ikea, the larger aim of her career, she says, is remediating "the lack of understanding smell has in our society." The first step is getting people to pay attention, even if it means using unseemly tactics like mixing up a kind of "filth soup" cologne and wearing it to a film festival, or simulating the body odors extracted from men having panic attacks and exhibiting them on scratch-and-sniff walls at MIT. "I have what scientists don't have--the guts to go out there and try my ideas out in reality," the 49-year-old says.

Read more here.

It's like Arne Jacobsen collaborating with McGruff the Crime Dog: The Stop Thief Chair, designed by the UK's Design Against Crime, is like Jacobsen's iconic Series 7 chair but with two slots to accommodate purse straps, hanging it in a difficult-to-snatch location.

The concept has been around for a while but the chairs, which are stackable and come in 12 colors, have just gone into actual production by Danish furniture company Dan-Form.

Nice: Shanghai-based designer Zhili Liu's lighting series was inspired by gatherings of birds, which becomes obvious when you see them. Up above are models entitled Sparrow, Nightingale and Dove, respectively. (We especially like the "bird in a cage" design of the Nightingale.) The designer came up with the concept circa 2006 and is now getting into the prototyping.

Cheap bakelite bulb sockets have been widely used in China, from workshops to living rooms for over 4 decades without any change. With a bulb and some wire, it makes a practical and reliable pendant lamp for less than 10 RMB (about 75 pence).

The bird lamps were designed to inherit the simplicity of the bakelite sockets but at the same time offer the user some more room for imagination - only by adding a little angle.

The sockets [are] made of bone china, which is translucent, heat proof and electrically safe. [It will] work with incandescent, CFLs or LED bulbs with a standard E-27 base.

via dezeen

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3d Modeler/Engineer
Incase Designs
San Francisco, CA

Incase is a lifestyle brand on a global basis and the leader in carrying solutions and innovations. We are currently looking for a 3D Modeler/Engineer to work in our design & development studio in the heart of downtown San Francisco. You will be under the direction of the creative silo of the hard-goods/innovation team, closely working with Industrial Designers to generate 3D databases and concept prototypes.

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The best design jobs and portfolios hang out at Coroflot.

Rob Walker pitches a great concept for some collective street art action: Signs advertising fanciful future-use development plans

There's a little building around the corner from me with this sign posted on it--a rendering of its supposed future. It's been there for years, and it's pretty obvious that it's at best a hypothetical future, and arguably a fictitious one. The actual building remains vacant, and in fact is for sale. Any development that may take place some day depends on someone buying it, and what they might want to do. Till then, it's just another empty building.

Read the rest of the post here.

We often see new pieces of furniture photographed "hero shot" style, with just one or two of them amidst an apartment-like catalogue background; so it's cool to see Austrian designer Thomas Feichtner's new stool design in all its mass production glory.

Called the Linz Hocker and made from recycled thermoplastic polymer by Vitra, the stool's "product launch" is actually an art installation:

The fundamental idea behind the installation, which consists of more than one thousand stools, is not to perform in a museum gallery but to launch signals from the [Landesgalerie] gallery. The temporary installation will not be preserved as a self-contained work but will be taken to pieces - the individual stools. Every visitor may remove a stool, starting the dismantling of the installation already from the opening of the exhibition "The Case Forum Design ". What will be left is: a piece of contemporary design in a number of Linz households.

The focus is not on giving something away but on the idea of artificial and sustainable democratization of design, projected onto a city like Linz. It is an attempt to use the visitor as distributor, supported by the suspension of all the market mechanisms to which any product is normally subjected.

One aspect of the concept is that over the years this product may become a unique Linz specimen: Stools will appear again and again in apartments, shops or studios. Some will change hands at the Linz flea markets after some years. In the course of time the Linz Hocker may begin to circulate in the City.

For more info, click here.

We also like that there are no dedicated slot widths, so you can throw in two regular-sized slices or a long piece of peasant bread and the like.

It's hard to say no to free raw materials. As a design student, you are perhaps even more inclined than regular students to pick up streetside milk crates, old refrigerators and the like and haul them back to your dorm to repurpose into a usable piece of furniture. When Miri Breskin, Adi Shpigel and Keren Tomer were ID students at Israel's Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, they took that a step further:

...they began keeping tabs on apartments that were being renovated, so that they could use the construction waste in their class assignments. What bothered them most of all was the question of where all the white plastic jalousie blinds - trisim - one of the most notorious components of apartment balconies in Greater Tel Aviv, disappeared to.

"We started tracing the path of discarded construction material," relates Tomer. "We discovered that the renovators weren't willing to give us the shutters and would only sell them to us, because they sell the aluminum frames. From the renovators we moved on to scrap metal shops, where we saw how they mishandled the poor plastic shutters, kicked them and broke them. We asked one of the scrap-shop owners for the shutters and because he had to pay for waste removal, he agreed to let us take as much as we wanted. We came, loaded up, and that's how we found new raw material to work with."

The trio has since opened up their own ID studio, Kulla Design, and have used trisim to create their own furniture line consisting of a chair, stool, CD rack, and room divider, seen above.

So. Is there anything useful that you see people throwing away en masse?

via haaretz