Sight Unseen invited us to participate in this year's NoHo Design District for New York Design Week. We've made custom butcher-themed meat balloons as a storefront display for Japan Premium Beef. Come by and see it if you're in town, and don't miss the rest of the design events this week.

Tonight, Berlin-based designer Jerszy Seymour will present A General Theory of Design," at the Columbus Auditorium at the Art Institute of Chicago at 6pm. Seymour is one of our design heroes, working with casual, "low" materials to investigate ideas about utopia, non-industrialism, and amateurism in event spaces provided by institutions across Europe.

University of Chicago's Smart Museum of Art is currently exhibiting Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, featuring works by Gordon Matta-Clark, Marina Abramović, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and etc. The exhibitions is accompanied by a program of participatory food-related events, including Tom Marioni's The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (pictured above, via Bad at Sports), basically a free beer bar opening several times over the next few months, bartended by different characters from Chicago's art scene.

This week, we made some Wabi Nabe popcorn in the ODL kitchen (our house). The lid of the Wabi Nabi is easy to tilt to the side, allowing the steam escape without losing any popped kernels. Makes enough for three episodes of your favorite sitcom, roughly.

ODLCO will be participating in Big Big City: Chicago, a one night pop-up art market put on by Big Big Things at Public Works Gallery in Wicker Park. We'll be selling our Wabi Nabe Cast Iron Pot and Balloon Prints. Come see us this Tuesday between 5 and 9pm.

Gabriel Hargrove, designer of the Wabi Nabe Cast Iron Pot for ODLCO (available here), posted a recipe for Corn Doggies, formulated especially for our lil' 3-pint. You need meat links, corn meal, oil and not much else. We've transcribed the recipe below, but visit his blog for more Wabi Nabe specific recipes, including fruit cobbler, simple bread, and shepherd's pie.

Just caught wind of the Threewalls spring salon schedule, themed Of Other Chicagos. We're pleased that it includes some dear friends of ours: Tim Parsons and Jess Charlesworth speak tonight at The Fine Art of Tinkering: adaptive re-use in object-making and public pedagogy, alongside Brett Ian Balogh, Nic Collins, Erik Peterson, and Charlie Vinz. The event starts at 7 sharp and runs till 9 and the threewalls space at 119 n. peoria #2c.

ODL is proud to be included in Temperature 2012, Volume Gallery's publication in conjunction with The Home Front at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. The book explores "what it means to be an American designer in our global culture" through a series of interviews with American designers.

Come celebrate with us at the book launch party, hosted by Andrew Rafacz Gallery on January 28th from 4-7pm. Details on the Facebook invite.