There are no design critics because there are no students of design criticism. But that’s about to change.

Icon interviewed Will Wright, veteran computer games designer and the creator of SimCity and The Sims, for our February issue. Here is the full transcript of that interview, which appeared in the magazine in condensed form.

Tokyo’s design week felt at times like a pseudo Bavarian Christmas market this year. Geared towards shopping, it has grown in size and sprawl, but for those with a flair for navigation there was some engaging work to be found.

Reading can be performance, decoration and cinema, according to a current exhibition at Galerie Kreo in Paris.

Sweets made using glass-making techniques have been created by French designers Sébastien Cordoleani and Franck Fortana.

“An ode to the original makers” is how Dutch designer Wieki Somers describes her latest project, in which she cast seats found while wandering the back streets of Beijing.

MVRDV has added to the shiny parade of contemporary architecture lining Omotesando, Tokyo’s best-known shopping street.

Innsbruck threw a party with fireworks, lasers and flying drummers to celebrate the opening of Zaha Hadid’s Nordpark Cable Railway in December.

A warehouse in Mumbai is sheathed in a matt grey cloak pleated into pyramids. Five-metre high windows are pulled out of the facade to provide natural light for a vast storage depot within.

Shaking off its heavy artistic pedigree, a show of stones and logos entices Emily King with everyday curiosities.

Mags in the Sixties had titles like ARSE. We’re less radical now but we have other pluses, says Beatrice Galilee

The design collectors’ favourite was no icy modernist – his work kept craft and bricolage alive in the machine age.

The paranoid and dystopian art of Shepard Fairey strips protest down to its angry basics, says Mike Atherton.

Penguin has produced many more than 700 great covers, so why so many duffs here?

I have decided to retreat into my usual role of observer and call in the help of three activists I admire immensely: an “architecture dissident”, a fashion renegade and an engineer, all of whom explore socio-technical changes through design and art.

It may be a tool of globalisation and a key factor in the rise of the Asian economies but the shipping container is also the all-star, eco-friendly, recyclable Lego brick of 21st-century architecture.

A deafening barrage of heavy artillery fire interspersed with the crackle of machine guns fills the air around the Bergen-Belsen Memorial.The scrubby heath landscape of the Lüneberger Heide region can be dour at the best of times, but in the weak winter light under a rain-bloated sky in early

Aranda/Lasch may be the only architects around to use a pseudonym. Under their own names, young New Yorkers Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch enter architecture competitions and design experimental furniture. As Terraswarm, they look for code.

Florence Doléac is waving a hand in the air. “I feel completely amused by situations I see. Everything is strange to me, but I feel fine in this reality. It’s enough fictional, enough absurd, enough crazy.”