The robots of the future, says Variate Labs’ Miles Kemp, won’t be humanoid servants. They will be the buildings and furniture around us, shape-shifting to our needs. Architecture will be in the hands of the user – or an army of intelligent nanobots.

Data centres are the vast storehouses of all our digital traffic, yet security concerns dictate that they remain anonymous: featureless boxes unmarked by corporate logos and hidden in the landscape.

Design practice BERG has adopted science fiction authors William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Warren Ellis as its “giant uncles”, but it is less interested in the distant future than in today’s ever smarter technology. The really hard task, they say, is “inventing next year”.

In his computer-controlled kinetic sculptures, Dutch artist Christiaan Zwanikken – the subject 
of a new film by Jarred Alterman – uses salvaged electronic parts to bring animal skeletons back to life.

Agata Pyzik enjoys a deft novel that is part parody of, part paean to the world of starchitects.

Data clouds are transforming our spatial and social relationships within the city.

Photographs of found objects were the stimulus for many of the furniture designer’s classic works.

Owen Hatherley revels in the pomp, but misses the politics, of a very English movement.

Charles Correa’s medical research centre in Lisbon is a private building that has turned over half its site to dramatic public spaces.

Diefabrik’s intriguingly shaped white lampshades caused a stir at DMY Berlin, where visitors were slow to grasp how they were made.

Steven Vandenborre has used a simple design language of concrete and timber to create a secluded holiday retreat – in a Belgian suburb.

Vienna’s Mischer Traxler twists an ostensibly prosaic basket-making project into a deft comment on the ambivalence of automation.

The work of the great French modernist was everywhere at Design Miami/Basel, while G-Star Raw and Vitra have reissued 17 classic pieces.

Snøhetta has mixed traditional and modern construction techniques to create a shelter “like a big bench” in the Norwegian wilderness.

The designer’s glassware is a playful response to the gestures of drinking: the clinking of tumblers or a warming hand on the bowl of a cognac glass.

With a hidden garden of wild flowers at its heart, this year’s design is a call for architects to reassess the relationship of building and garden.

Tomas Libertiny and his 60,000 bees tested the limits of Venetian glassmaking to produce their largest collaboration to date.

The Italian design duo’s Botanica range of vases reinvents plastic as a craft material by using long-forgotten plant and animal polymers.

Jestico and Whiles’ design for the Mayfair club flirts with 1960s nostalgia to reinterpret Hugh Hefner’s vision of a louche bachelor heaven.

Dominique Coulon has built an angular and colourful educational complex on the site of a notorious housing estate in the Paris banlieues.

Dieter Rams’ 1959 modular shelving system has grown old gracefully, living up to the German designer’s high ideals of enduring simplicity, harmony and flexibility.

While not all of the items on this list feature for purely aesthetic reasons, these are the things I encounter every day and simply can’t do without.