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According to a recent study released by the 9th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, Australia ranks as the third most unaffordable housing market in the world – just a whisker behind New Zealand, with Hong Kong towering above everyone.

Sydney-based interior design studio and DIA Practice Member, Arent & Pyke, has recently completed its first commission in New York, designing a West Village apartment in Manhattan for a Sydney client.

Something is powerfully wrong at the Powerhouse.

Many Australian designers – and graphic designers in particular – are now aware that Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, the organiser of the Sydney Design Festival, got its fingers badly burnt recently when it decided to employ an American crowdsourcing website to solicit poster ‘designs’ for the 2013 Sydney Design Festival.

Of course, crowdsourcing has its uses, but using it to obtain designs at little or no cost through a competitive process amounts to pitching, pure and simple, and directly contravenes the publicly stated policies of the overwhelming majority of the world’s leading design organisations.

DIA Practice Member and Melbourne-based brand management agency Diadem is helping Air New Zealand roll out its new brand identity at forty-seven New Zealand and international airports.

One of Australia’s most esteemed graphic designers and a member of the DIA Hall Of Fame, Alex Stitt, was the illustrator behind some of Australia’s most recognised advertising campaigns, including Slip Slop Slap’s ‘Sid Seagull’ and the couch-loving ‘Norm’ of the Life Be In It campaign.

World Industrial Design Day, an initiative of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid), is observed annually on the 29th June in recognition of the profession of industrial design.

Fashion designers, product designers, toy designers, perhaps even jewellery designers – beware.

Are your designs anatomically correct?

More importantly, are they in acceptable physical proportions, adhering to physiological, racial and sociological norms or ideals?

In 1959 Ruth Handler, a co-founder of the American Mattel toy company, created a stylised ‘teenage fashion’ doll which she named Barbie, after her own daughter Barbara.

The Vincci Bit Hotel in Barcelona is one of the new breed of ‘art’ hotels that have mushroomed around the world, using a fusion of art and design to create their interiors and branding, which they hope will attract a suitably interested clientele.

As ever, some do it better than others.

Okay, it’s not ‘design’ as such, but as a source of unalloyed pleasure for many millions – not a few of whom would be designers – the longest ever American sitcom, animated series and prime time, scripted television series, extolled as possibly one of the greatest ever (American) television series of all time, a production whose fictitious characters have made it onto Hollywood’s Walk of Fame and whose utterances have made it into the Oxford English Dictionary and our modern vocabulary (Homer’s ‘D’oh!’), ‘The Simpsons’ must have been seen by nearly everyone on the planet at some time or another.

Not too long ago, if you weren’t living in Italy or had Italian forebears, the only type of pasta was apparently ‘spaghetti’, usually grossly overcooked and slowly drowning in a glutinous, unappetising red tomato sauce.