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Object Culture

What Our First Industrial Design School Assignment Should Have Been: Self-Made Carrying Cases

By Rain Noe - February 26, 2014

One of our first assignments as industrial design students should have been to design and build our own carrying cases. But no, we students were too busy being taught crap like theory, so we all coughed up twenty bucks for a plastic ArtBin. Which is a shame. A simple modular toolbox would have been relatively straightforward to design and build, while providing us with the perfect, individualized product to field test and tweak the design of over the course of a semester.

From Germany comes what they're calling the Toptainer, seen here. Once loaded up with tools, it's meant to fit into an older plastic Systainer design.

As you can see by the joinery the pieces are CNC-milled, but had we students been asked to build something similar with conventional shop tools, it would have taught us to use the tablesaw, bandsaw and a drill press.

What would have been even cooler is if second semester, they paired us with "clients"—students from other disciplines—to design cases for them. This Japanese-tool-inspired Systainer insert would have been perfect for Sculpture majors, no?

Not that we would have needed to stay with an open-sided design. Here a Brazilian YouTuber shows how to make a simple closed-sided toolbox, from start to finish, with modular inserts. His descriptions are in Portugese, but I like to think we ID'ers speak the International Language of Love of Building Things.

ID professors reading this: Yes, I know the department head is on your ass about covering that ridiculously thick curriculum, but see if you can't get those sophomores covered in sawdust for a spell.

Rain Noe

Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.

2 Comments

Patrick

5 years ago

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This would have been great!

For a kid just out of school to learn about user needs, metrics and testing in a workshop environment would be astronomical!

No doubt Carlos and I share the same favourite class, getting the noobs into the 'dust' as abovementioned would teach them the value of hard work; plus drill them on how to use the CNC rather than asking eeeevery time.
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carlos

5 years ago

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this would've been a great project in id school!
my favorite subject in freshman year was shop class and we made furniture and stuff but i would have liked this.

another addition to this is to check them again on your senior year. hoping that you've been using it, the prof could now check if you made any changes along the way and how the box is holding up.
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