Opinion: in the first of two columns about the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob asks what America's Prism surveillance program tells us about design thinking.

As details of the American National Security Agency's Prism programme emerge, alongside concerns about democracy, freedom, state surveillance and the complicity of corporations, something also seems to be revealed about the ways in which digital technologies are fundamentally reformulating the ways in which design - a new kind of design born out of digital culture - now organises and impacts the way we live.

Back in 1995, Richard Barbrook and the late Andy Cameron wrote an essay called The Californian Ideology. In it, they argued that digital culture - at least the digital culture of Silicon Valley - had become a fusion of the "free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies".

They said that the emerging information technologies provided the space in which this amalgamation of opposites could occur and they called this cocktail of libertarian values and entrepreneurship The Californian Ideology. They also said, even back then, that "the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete".

That, of course, was long before Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook et al. had risen to become such gigantic corporations, way before they had became the supra-national entities embedded so completely in our everyday lives. Before even some of them were founded.

The designs of the hardware, software and services these companies offer are often described as ecosystems. Ecosystems, in this meaning of the word, are the virtual worlds that we find ourselves enmeshed in: places that we can’t get out of, like Apple's Mac OS, iOS, iTunes and iPhone, or Google's services that link activities like search, calendar, documents, email, chat and so on. These environments have grown up around us like the Wild Things forest in Max's bedroom. They've grown so high and wide that there is no longer a way out of them.

The term ecosystem was originally coined in 1935 to describe the physical and biological components of an environment considered in relation to each other, all as one totality. It's all the living and non-living organisms and the interactions between them within a given space. The conflation of this concept of ecology and the digital is, as we shall later see, significant.

And it’s perhaps no accident that these digital worlds are described in terms of the natural given the half-hippy roots of its culture. Note for example the title of the 1967 techno-pastorolist poem All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace that imagined a world where advanced cybernetics allowed humankind to return to a bucolic paradise lost.

It's also telling that in citing the natural, these private digital realms attempt to naturalise themselves. What else could there be in naming the infrastructure of the wireless internet - all those cables and power plants, those server farms and data stores in concrete bunkers, signal masts and satellites - as something as simple as a cloud? And that’s not even to mention the suggestions of weightlessness or cherub-strewn holiness that clouds also contain.

Adam Curtis used the title All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace for his documentary describing how digital technology failed to liberate humanity and instead "distorted and simplified our view of the world around us" as it twisted from hippy to zippy to yuppie. But wether you buy his argument or not, it’s clear that the digital has distorted the world. Perhaps the greatest digital distortion of the world around us is spatial and I'm not talking about the Apple Maps fiasco.

Digital space gives us access to anything, anywhere. It gives us endless proximity to our emails, photos and any other data that we’ve handed over to the various corporate clouds that surround us. It means we can be in constant contact with other places regardless of physical coordinates. That, in essence, is the beautiful liberation that digital culture has given us.

It's these same properties of digital space that allow corporate ecosystems to be simultaneously at one's elbow when it suits them and somewhere else (or nowhere else) when it comes to issues of taxation. Digital space - which is also the space through which global finance flows - does not necessarily recognise other definitions of space. Until, that is, it runs into something like the Great Firewall of China that acts as a digital manifestation of national territory.

These spatial slippages re-order traditional definitions of public and private, something most shockingly demonstrated in the phone hacking scandal where individuals' voicemails stored on the servers of mobile phone companies were remotely accessed by newspapers - most disturbingly the voicemails of murdered teenager Milly Dowler. The cloud means that even the most intimate details of one’s personal life are everywhere, all the time. The cloud transforms the nature of space. It alters what we understand to be inside and outside, what is public and private.

The revelations about the US-run Prism program over the last week suggest that it's not just the newsworthy who are affected. It’s all of us. Through Prism, the US National Security Agency apparently has access on a massive scale to individuals chat logs, stored data, voice traffic, file transfers and social networking data. According to reports, Prism can access this data though a "back door" in the servers of major technology companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. Prism seems to be an extension to these digital ecosystems, the dark cloud.

These organisations have all denied the existence of this "back door". Perhaps they’re telling the truth: what, after all, is this old fashioned, physical, architectural metaphor even doing in this debate? A back door suggests a spatial, architectural hierarchy of progression from public to private that simply does not exist in digital space. So why use this linguistic image at all? Perhaps it's there to suggest that digital culture is not so radically different after all. That is does, or at least could, obey the kinds of spatial separations that physical space contains in its very nature.

Prism tells us something about design in the twenty-first century. And it's certainly not its logo - or that of the apparently conspiracy-theorist-baiting Information Awareness Office - that recalls that Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring two SS officers wondering if the skull logo on their caps might suggest that they are actually the baddies. It tells us that design is increasingly about systems, increasingly about processes and they way these interface with the real world.

Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. This is a problem-solving methodology born out of similarly strange bedfellows as The Californian Ideology. In this case it's art school creativity hijacked by management theory. Design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. Its power is its ability to transform anything into a design problem: the way organisations work, profitability, market share, information, the gathering and processing of intelligence and, it seems, national security.

Design thinking is marked by the scale and scope of its operations. Rather than isolating particular problems, it attempts to survey the whole scenario. It conceives the field of operation as the system rather than the object. And in this, it transforms the designed world into an ecosystem. Design thinking treats this synthetic ecosystem as its project, attempting to redesign it according to particular goals, to achieve its desired outcomes.

By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological cant.

Of course, like digital culture and like late capitalism, design thinking prefers to appear a non-ideological matter of common sense. Apparently de-politicised and post-ideological, design thinking appears free of its own innate desires and tendencies in order to open-mindedly and radically reinvent the world.

I would argue that design thinking is a product of digital culture. It shares the values of innovation and entrepreneurship bound up in the digital world and follows the same open-necked babyboom commune to boardroom trajectory. It’s also a product of how digital culture shows us the world: of networks and accumulations of big data. It's a product, in part perhaps, of the converging digital tools we use across disciplinary boundaries. But more than this, it's a product of the the fact that the digital is both where we design and what we design, both subject and object of contemporary design activity.

Design thinking annexes the perceived power of design and folds it into the development of systems rather than things. It's a design ideology that is now pervasive, seeping into the design of government and legislation (for example, the UK Government’s Nudge Unit which works on behavioral design) and the interfaces of democracy (see the Design of the Year award-winning .gov.uk). If these are examples of ways in which design can help develop an open-access, digital democracy, Prism is its inverted image. The black mirror of democratic design, the dark side of design thinking. Whether legal or not, Prism is a design-thinking solution to national security.

If design thinking is part of the triumph of The Californian Ideology, part of the way that digital culture is remaking the world, is Prism its Waterloo? Perhaps it is the moment Californian digital culture turned inside out, the point when these apparently pro-libertarian entities melded to become one with the state, a strange new version of the military-digital-industrial complex cooked up out of acid-soaked West Coast radicalism and frictionless global capitalism.

In next week's column we will explore how the idea of the digital ecosystem and the tools of design thinking project out from the screen into the world, reforming ideas of landscape, nature and space.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night Schoolat the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editingwww.strangeharvest.com.

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Opinion: a pizza crust stuffed with a hot dog could be the ultimate expression of contemporary design culture, suggests Sam Jacob in this week's opinion column.

If this is all that's left for design to do on this earth then maybe we are finally fulfilling that quaint Victorian statement that everything that can be invented has been invented.

That's the second thought I had after seeing the latest product out of the gate from Domino's secret diabolical research facility: the Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza. The first thought was where I was going to vomit.

Think of it for a second. Turn the idea over in your mind slowly: a pizza whose crust contains a hot dog. Yes, a sausage that loops around a pizza's circumference like a mechanically-recovered meat Large Hadron Collider.

Crusts, of course, have troubled pizza makers for years. To the volume pizza industry crusts are dead air, the unfortunate bready by-product of the pizza-making process. Barren, boring margins to the infinite possibilities of a pizza's surface daubed with cheese, tomato, pepperoni, chicken tikka and so on.

Previous attempts to transform these tasteless terrains have included stuffing them with cheese (acceptable in my book, at least in principle, because it's just a rejigging of certifiable pizza ingredients) and so-called "crust-less" pizzas (weird, like a spineless book or a hairless cat). Other tactics have included transforming the pizza base into a sandwich of discs glued together with a garlic flavour emulsion (frankly revolting and a thankfully short-lived experiment).

But this ring of meat takes the biscuit. The Hot Dog Stuffed Crust is a fast food crossing of the streams, a hybridised foodstuff too far. But don't blame Domino's. It was apparently Pizza Hut who first introduced it. Domino's version just ups the ante with mustard already lining the orbital sausage cavity. Pizza Hut has fought back with more innovation: the Hot Dog Pizza Bites Pizza: "pull-apart crust with 28 succulent mini hot dog bites, packed with delicious flavour" (in case you needed further explanation).

We might be appalled by the fact that this ever got off the drawing board and onto the back of a delivery moped driving around the very same streets that you and I walk. But I think I'm not alone in also secretly applauding the sheer ingenuity of this foul invention.

Let's suspend judgement for a moment. For, as revolting as it may be, the Hot Dog Stuffed Pizza Crust represents a form of design thinking. That is to say, it isn't a one-off incident but a product of the zeitgeist. It's something that could simply not have happened say, 30 years ago. The HDSCP emerges out of a culture that we are all part of, that we all participate in, that we all contribute to. Frightening as it may be, all of us are responsible for the existence of the Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza.

Here are some of the things that I would argue enable humanity to conceive of the HDSCP; its cultural ingredients, in other words. Third Way politics that suggested you could be both left and right at the same time without being either. Hacking culture. Surrealism. Postmodernism (which might problematise the very idea of "pizza" and "hot dog" in the first place).

Robert Venturi (a better example of "both/and" you’d be hard pushed to find). Advertising. Pornography. Swiss Army knives. Photoshop. The convergence of uses that electronics has delivered since the digital watch first gave us a clock that was also a calculator (i.e. there's not much ground to travel between the idea of a phone + camera to a pizza + hot dog).

All these phenomena (and many more) change the way in which we think. They alter our expectation of things, what we want them to do and to be. Design is something animated by forces outside of itself, shaped by the broad culture within which it practises. Objects, much as we'd like them to, can no longer be simple, natural or authentic because of the sheer complexity of contemporary production and consumption.

Much like food itself, the sensations of simplicity, naturalness and authenticity can only be created with spectacular and concentrated effort. The cult of the natural – so understandable a yearning in the face of things like the HDSCP – is as synthetic as everything else.

The Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza might be a revolting thought, but it is also an object that crystallises a trope of contemporary design culture. Its appallingness has a purity to it, a clarity that reveals tendencies that often lurk below the surface of design, hidden by good taste and convincing rhetoric.

If I were helping build the Design Museum's new collection and wanted the object ne plus ultra of 2013, it would be this. An object so completely of its moment that if it was all that was left of civilisation, future archeologists could decode the entire socioeconomic structure of our society.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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Opinion: as the Bank of England unveils the design of its new £5 note, Sam Jacob ponders the historic and cultural symbolism of money in this week's opinion column.

Last week the Bank of England announced its new £5 note. In 2016 Elizabeth Fry (don't worry, I had to look her up too) will be replaced by a new design with Winston Churchill's jowly boat race plastered all over the great British Pam Shriver.

Of course, we need new notes. Money gets worn out. It gets handled, dragged out of pockets, shoved in purses, rolled up, folded, scrawled on and so on. And as forgery gets smarter, the anti-forgery devices incorporated into currency need to evolve. But the changing cast of characters that play across our national currency also provide a portrait of the nation at any given moment.

The design of currency is then a technical, cultural and conceptual project. Money first is a representation of value, a kind of floating signifier of the value it represents. It's both the value and the representation of that value simultaneously and locks value into its representation through the steps it takes to be unforgeable.

While performing these complex sleights of hand and technical feats, money also acts as a piece of national pageantry. It sits amongst the accoutrements of state that include the symbols and bureaucratic paraphernalia of a state, somewhere between a flag and a driving licence.

We know that money – as in coins and notes – isn't really real. It's just a physical manifestation of an abstract value. It is, in the great phrasing of a US customs form, a 'monetary instrument'. Monetary value itself is an invisible entity that can leap from one state to another with ease. It slips in and out of substances as though it were a restless supernatural spirit.

We know the story of how money developed this supernatural power: how coins began as the thing of value itself, as lumps of value, actual pieces of gold for example, unitised. We know that this equivalence of substance to value shifted so that the coin referred to a value that was now held elsewhere. We know too how notes became a way of referring to value by acting as a promise that the actual material would one day change hands. And we know that this act of referred value came to mean something so significant that it gained a life of its own – the sign became a thing in itself. Money flipped. It changed from being the substance that contained the value to a symbol of that value, from the thing to a sign.

As objects, coins and notes are pitted by the residues of this history and scored by the presence of value. Their design is a record of the ways in which value is manufactured and protected.

Its surfaces construct the idea of value. They are embellished with symbols of nationhood, state, monarchy and culture that derive from the arcania of heraldic design, a language that links it to the sovereignty and government, symbolically tied to economic mechanisms that underpin the idea of money. Equally they protect value through the intricate lacings of so many security systems: inks and colours, holograms and watermarks, foil strips and paper, the fritted edges that once foiled those who would have shaved off slivers of gold.

Filigree lines loop back on themselves with almost psychotic intensity, so fine that you can zoom in and in. Images break down into patterns like fingerprints as though money wasn't something you could actually draw with a line, only suggestively sketch. Its tentative quality is a matter of anti-counterfeiting but also perhaps an expression of the immateriality of value, graphically on the verge of immateriality, a point cloud that can only approximate the thing it is trying to represent.

Money is covered with historical reference. Maybe it's the same kind of validation that banks once used when they were built in the form of Classical temples: historical reference somehow conferring significance. Churchill's image on a bank note then transfers his significance, his personality and historical narrative not only onto money, but into it too. It works as a form of cultural guarantee. Euro notes too seem to have the whole history of Europe backing them. They have images of bridges, arches and gateways that look quintessentially European. Except, look closer: that's not actually a Rialto or Pont de Neuilly! The landmarks depicted are not real things or places, they are things designed to evoke the sensation of European history and culture. They are imaginary renditions of Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Modern. It's the story of Europe told through an imaginary architecture.

One can imagine the extreme lengths designers and their Eurocrat clients went to avoid national favouritism, to tell an inclusive story that all of the EU could feel part of. But one wonders if they also considered the narrative they were writing through this imaginary, non-existent Europa-heritage. For example, did they think of the implications of using essentially faked-up historical images as the face of money? As a thing that spends so much of its effort - so much of its surface and material quality - being authentic and non-fake?

As an aside: oh how I'd love to build full-size replicas of these imaginary historical sites - a version of fake Europe so real that it would be indistinguishable from actual Europe as precipitated by, y'know, real events and people (aka, history).

The aesthetic of money remains distinct even as it intersects with more contemporary design sensibilities like the recent British coins that fragmented the Royal Shield head over varied denomination coins if you arranged them in the right way, or Hong Kong dollars with their see-through plastic.

Maybe the future of money is Bitcoin, the digital currency based on open source cryptographic protocols that has recently been in the headlines for the volatile fluctuations in its value. Bitcoin has internalised the visual and material security systems of physical currency into the complexity of its algorithmic generation - the so called 'mining' of Bitcoins. Its value is (if I understand it correctly) related to the computational labour of manufacturing it. Which seems far more appropriate, far more accurate a description of what contemporary money actually is than being linked to gold reserves.

Right now Bitcoin is really only useful for buying sandwiches in Kreuzberg or illegal substances online. But perhaps it provides a far better, far more realistic depiction of value than those anachronistic notes and coins.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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Opinion: in this week's column Sam Jacob argues that architectural education is in crisis and must become more accessible.

I’m in the throes of launching Night School at the Architectural Association. It is, as they say, pretty much what it says on the tin: an after-hours architecture school. But if architectural education is the tin, that really makes it a can of worms. Its that knot (if you’ll forgive the extended metaphor) of tangled architectural education worms that Night School really seeks to address.

In 2012, university tuition fees in the UK rose to a maximum of £9000 per year before you even think about living expenses - let alone field trips, print-outs, laser cutting, 3D printing or whatever else you’ll need to splash out on along the way to getting qualified. Add to that a year out between degree and diploma during which time, if you’re lucky enough to get a job in something resembling an architectural practice, you're likely to be pretty poorly remunerated.

Though we often imagine the idea of architectural education to be a natural and inevitable phenomenon, it is of course an accidental by-product of educational politics and economics, of demands of professional training and of murkily subjective disciplinary ideas.

The current model emerged from the 1958 RIBA Conference on Architectural Education. It’s clear that this 55-year-old model has been stretched into an uncomfortable shape, impossible for many to inhabit due to the levels of capital required before, during and after qualification. Equally, under the EU Commission's proposal for a revised Professional Qualifications Directive, changes are likely to be made to the duration and make-up of studying architecture.

And that’s before we even begin to look at the current state of the profession, buffeted from all sides by double-dip recession, low fees, the rise of the project manager and design and build contracts, and other erosions of an architect's traditional role. What an architect is and does - what, indeed architecture means - is very different in 2013 to what it was in 1958.

Though, in architecture, we’re prone to describing any small disturbance as a crisis, I think we can really see a structural problem. First, the traditional idea of architectural education is becoming, given the prevailing political scenario, increasingly difficult for students to support. Second, the professional reality to which this form of education is addressed is undergoing rapid change. Well, “never let a serious crisis go to waste" as Rahm Emanuel, then Barack Obama's chief of staff, once said.

The Architectural Association itself has its origins in a previous educational crisis. It was formed as a night school before it became anything we might recognise as a contemporary architecture school. It arose in reaction to the conditions of architectural education in the mid-nineteenth century, which were based around being articled to a practicing architect; the AA’s founders objected to the way this often became a form of servitude rather than education. Formed initially as a club, its members would meet bi-weekly, first issuing a brief then meeting to assess each other's work, sometimes with an invited critic. From these origins the school as we know it developed, with the night school existing into the 1920s.

The legacy of the night school suggests activities that were educationally experimental, practical, social and directly engaged with issues facing the contemporary profession. It suggests something light-footed, responsive and engaged with its audience. It is many of these qualities that the new Night School wishes to resurrect.

Night School, then, is a speculative project dealing with alternative models of architectural education - the chance to conduct timely experiments in other ways of learning, other forms of generating knowledge and expertise.

The programme starts with the premise that education should not be the preserve of students. Education, instead, is something that is present throughout one's career in architecture: as student, as tutor and as practitioner. In an era of rapid technological, economic and disciplinary change, the chance to retrain, rethink and reskill is becoming more vital.

What we hope to do is to turn the amazingly valuable and exciting culture of architecture schools inside out, to offer it up to a wider audience of students from other schools, to recent graduates and professionals buried deep in practice, and to the general public, whose interest in architecture often exceeds what is offered by Sunday supplement profiles of star architects and nice house refurbishments. Equally, we hope that engaging these audiences cross-fertilises with the school to create a dynamic dialogue between education and the profession, between theory and practice, and between the usual roles of student and teacher.

The future of architectural education is currently being debated within the RIBA (the UK’s validating body) and the UK Architectural Education Review Group. The study led by Terry Farrell into the UK’s national architecture policy, reporting to culture minister Ed Vaizey, has also promised to address the issue.

It seems there is agreement that the current model of architectural education must change, and agreement that it should become more flexible towards ways of studying and the amount of time it takes to qualify. What’s important in this debate is to ensure architectural education remains vital, challenging and culturally (as well as technically and professionally) engaged, and to ensure it remains open and accessible. I’d argue that somewhere in this current crisis lurks an opportunity to develop stronger, more vibrant and more relevant forums for generating and sharing architectural knowledge.

Top: photograph from the Architectural Association Photo Library

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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Opinion: in his latest Opinion column, Sam Jacob argues that the UK government's plans to extend the copyright term for design "protect existing interests instead of promoting innovation".

Later this year the UK government plans to change copyright law for design, extending the period of protection for designs deemed “artistic” until 70 years after the death of the creator. In essence, that means the entire oeuvre of canonical twentieth century design. Wrapped up in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill is legislation that will have a profound effect on design culture.

Currently, design for artistic works, which may well include prototype models of design icons, has copyright protection in the UK from “the end of the period of 25 years from the end of the calendar year in which such articles are first marketed”. That means that a designer of an artistic work has a 25-year monopoly to exploit the design before it passes into the public domain.

That means there is nothing legally wrong with you or I knocking up our own version of a Le Corbusier lounger or an Eames chair and there are, of course, many replicas on the market now - though you should get them while you can before the ERRB becomes law. There’s nothing wrong (legally) with a company producing exact replicas and selling them far cheaper than Knoll, Vitra or Herman Miller’s “authentic” replicas.

Thinking about the issue of copyright in other industries is illuminating. For example, the big pharmaceutical companies rely on the protection of intellectual property to give them a period of monopoly in which they can recoup (and obviously exceed, sometimes many times over) the vast sums they invest in research and testing.

Here, intellectual property acts as a motivator for development, offering a reward for the risk and experimentation that the companies take on up-front. Even then, the period of protection is short – 20 years from the date of application for the patent. Most of those 20 years will be lost on proving to regulators that it is safe and it works.

But in design, do the big companies invest in research to anything like the same extent? Do the likes of Knoll, Vitra and Herman Miller really support innovation? Or do they mainly exploit the back-catalogue of their intellectual property portfolio by churning out more and more products by Mies van der Rohe, Charles and Ray Eames, and George Nelson? It’s certainly easier: no expensive designers to pay, no re-tooling of production lines, no real risk. It is an enviable situation - a market that they essentially control with consumers caught in an endless love affair with mid-century furniture.

I’d argue that they don’t even have to create this demand: the desirable, canonical status of the named designers is not bestowed by the marketing initiatives of the design companies themselves. It’s a function of academic scholarship, art history, museums and other institutions, whose commitment (and, often, whose funding) is public - serving culture and knowledge rather than private interest.

Extending copyright for design to 70 years from the author’s death suddenly pushes the whole of modernism back into private ownership. It means, one can estimate, protection of around 100 years for the design of, say, a chair. It essentially fixes the field of design for the foreseeable future and condemns us to mid-century modernism until the middle of the next century.

Copyright’s expiration period creates dynamism in creative activity. Twenty-five years seems long enough for a company to recoup the costs of design development and it also means that they have to develop new designs of equal merit to replenish their stock of design rights. The extension will mean there is less incentive to invest, to experiment and to develop new designs.

There are shades of the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” at work here, the phrase used to describe the 1998 extension of US copyright terms that was heavily lobbied by Disney. Equally, it echoes the UK’s "Cliff's law", named after singer Cliff Richard, which extended the copyright term of music recordings from 50 years to 70 years.

Both are pieces of legislation that protect existing interests instead of promoting innovation. It’s interesting to note that there has been significant lobbying with regard to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill on behalf of “well known furniture designers and manufacturers.” It has also been welcomed by the Design Council.

At heart this is more than a legal matter, more than an argument over knock-off Barcelona chairs. Wrapped up in this proposed legislation is a disciplinary definition of what design actually is.

Is design, to quote Mies van der Rohe himself, “the will of an epoch transformed into space”? This, of course, is the spirit of innovation and radical experiment that brought these design classics into existence in the first place. Or is design, as the ERRB seems to propose, the will of a previous epoch transformed into private interest?

I’d argue for the former, for ramping up design research and development, and for greater investment in design by those private interests to create the design classics of the future.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

Top image of Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair courtesy of Shuttershock

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