Our houses are getting smaller. Unlike in France and Germany, where houses are bigger – and have to be by law – houses in the UK are getting smaller by the square foot and by the room. In 1991, 73% of new builds were houses, to 27% flats. This is now a 50/50 spilt. The number of one- and two-bedroom houses being built is on the rise, while three- and four-bedroom houses are falling rapidly. The average room size in France is a whopping 22.6m2, and in Germany it’s an ample 19.7m2, but we in the UK are crammed into just 16.3m2. And while room sizes are increasing in France and Germany, Britain’s kitchens and dining rooms are headed in the opposite direction. This isn’t just changing the landscape – it’s changing the population too. A huge 2.8m people aged 18-44 are delaying having children because of the lack of affordable housing, says the New Statesman. “The shrinking housing stock – and the fact the baby-boomers have robbed their own children of the chance to be homeowners by embracing buy-to-let and eloping with it – is literally stopping Britain growing,” says Julia Margo, deputy director of Demos. “Young Britons are being squeezed financially and spatially, shut out from mortgages and boxed into conceiving later. We are Generation Crunch.”

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No matter how bright our star shines we are all worm food in the end, as we were reminded last week when a memorial headstone was unveiled for Anthony H Wilson who died in August 2007. The tribute to the legendry Factory Records founder was designed by colleagues Peter Saville and Ben Kelly and bears a quote from The Manchester Man: “Mutability is the epitaph of worlds, Change alone is changeless, People drop out of the history of a life as of a land, Though their work and influence remains”. Whilst the passing of the man who brought us Joy Division, New Order and the Happy Mondays was a huge loss to the cultural landscape, I think the rest of us mere mortals can take some comfort here. Firstly, no matter how rich and famous you are, we all go the same way in the end. (Yes Bon Jovi. Even you.) Secondly, if we find ourselves with a glut of X Factor has-beens on our hands, society can always re-direct their skills as gravestone designers.

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What is it with wheels and the knack they have for bringing people together? Skaters, petrol-heads, Hell’s Angels…the trusty wheel doesn’t just take us places, it takes us places together. And so it would seem that the magic of the wheel is doing just that for a collective of bike enthusiasts ‘Mixt Meat’ who recently launched a blog by that name to document their adventures, musings, bike skills and general ‘hanging outness’. Mixt Meat (the name refers to their mixed backgrounds and ‘meat’ is slang for mate) can be spotted in and around East London, are more than a bike “crew”. They are a family committed to making the bike community bigger and better. “Its not about whose better than whom, what kind of bike you ride or where you come from. We all share the same love for riding a bike and that’s really all it comes down to. If you ride a bike and you are not a dick then come hangout and that’s pretty much it,” said one Mixt Meat member in a story on La Lavinia Cycle Blog – words that stands in stark contrast with an article run in the Guardian this weekend entitled ‘The bike snob’s guide to cycling tribes’. And in an increasingly bike crazed London where 51% of people own at least one bike, there are 450,000 bike journeys made a day, and 60,000 bike thefts a year, Mixt Meat are just the kind of cool but caring bike gang you want hanging out in the city streets.

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‘Buffing’ is the process of removing graffiti from various surfaces, usually using high-pressure water cleaners, and unsurprisingly, writers hate it. That’s what makes it so brilliant that, in their inimitable style, they’ve taken the tools of the trade used by anti-graffiti groups to eradicate pieces and tags and used them to actually create more. And just to really rub salt in the wound, these pieces are not only largely totally legal but they also point out the state of grime and decay that most of our cities exist in (a state that graffiti generally seeks to improve, contrary to what buffers think). Buff bombing or reverse graffiti has spawned a whole host of great work and is also beginning to be adopted by brands to create spectacular and alternative OOH executions.

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Diaghilev started a dialogue between dance, art and design that continues today. He brought in people who had never designed for dance, like orientalist Leon Bakst and avant-garde director Jean Cocteau. They created a new aesthetic that coloured contemporary design and fashion, and still does. The London School of Fashion are working on a project inspired by the Ballets Russes which is on show in a mixed media performance with English National Ballet dancers, free, next month. When Chanel designed for Diaghilev’s productions in 1914 she took contemporary style and turned it into costumes. Since then, designers as diverse Lacroix, YSL, Comme des Garcons, Galliano and Alice Temperley have taken Ballet Russes costumes and reinterpreted them in fashion. For S/S 2011, fashion darling of the moment Erdem drew on Bakst’s designs, “They are so surreal and vivid. I think it’s the exoticism and escapism of Bakst’s work that is so inspiring and what makes it quite timeless.”

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Why bemoan the loss of the scrappy holiday reads, the environmentally unfriendly Tesco paperback 3for2 shelf-fillers? They’re not truly loved anyway. Might as well be read on Kindle. Instead, we need to think about how best to bring a story to life in whatever format that is. Like IDEO’s re-imagining of Alice, with alternate chapters and embedded codes, it takes the reader from fiction to reality, and is more akin to a video game than a novel. Or Jonathan Safran Foer and Orhan Pamuk talking about the book as an object at the forthcoming New Yorker Festival. Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest novel Tree of Codes pictured here, reimagines the novel as a sculptural object. Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper is equally pushing boundaries. Chunks of the book are told in 4-tiered columns, giving readers the same story told from the perspective of 4 different people. All of this is about designing ‘storytelling experiences’ that involve the reader. Skim through, dip in, scroll down, or flit on and off line, are the new ways we are navigating page to screen. What’s interesting is the increasing role design is playing in both the new and old worlds of publishing. If it’s just about text, then arguably, books might as well live on Kindle. Beautiful, engaging, lasting design is what gives books a reason to be and what makes them come alive, whether that’s in print or online.

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The AppLounge is the first digital store of its kind, where the best of bricks and mortar and online retail have been converged. As part of the London Design Festival, The AppLounge encourages the public to discover and sample new mobile and tablet applications and digital content, including eBooks, eMags, and useful online services. Sourced from creative agencies around the world, many of the apps are matched with accessories and fashion items to fit with individual lifestyle tastes. The idea being to make digital retail feel more like lifestyle shopping. It’s the Apple store one step on. And ultimately aims to answer the challenges bricks and mortar stores face as ecommerce reshapes the retail experience and consumer behaviour. The AppLounge creator Alexander Grünsteidl (who was also behind Digital Wellbeing Labs) says, ‘We are witnessing a transformation in business models for retailers which is opening up possibilities for convergent retail. This space is designed to encourage customers to slow down, have a drink, and sample a variety of applications and accessories on display.’

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One of the festival’s most anticipated features this year was the Anti Design Festival (ADF), directed Neville Brody. A reaction to the commercialized main festival, the ADF aimed to shift the focus from bums-on-seats to brain food, and from taste and style to experiment and risk. So whilst the main festival was a celebration of design, this was all about the embrace of failure as a viable way forward. One of our favourite bits of the ADF was Microplex, the world’s smallest cinema (5 seats) which showed a series of weird and wonky films. Which was then only to be outdone the Picoplex, a one-person cinema in a ‘portable hood’ (like those big dryers you get at the hairdressers grannies sit under). We really like the idea of a commercial festival embracing its underbelly. If only London Fashion Week did something like this some buyers might actually turn up.

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We are used to the burger wars between McDonalds and Burger King being pretty greasy affairs, but now they are going all upmarket in an effort to improve the perceptions of the brands. Burger King has recently announced that they are to expand their stylish Whopper Bars, launched last year. The wannabe hipster hangout, Whopper Bars offer the traditional Whopper in more customisable outcomes (there is something like 80 different possible combinations). The King is clearly responding to McDonalds’ successful remodeling of their restaurants, which coincided with a menu revamp focusing on healthier options. Is it a ‘build it and they will come’ moment for BK? The new owners will certainly hope so. I kinda wish everyone would be less insecure and just embrace what they are, the perfect destination when stumbling towards the last tube on a Friday night.