There's Nick Clegg and Miriam González Durántez's light-hearted effort – concocted with a little help from their sons, Antonio, Alberto and Miguel, on the family iPad. (Haynes, 2013).

That follows Ed Milliband and Justine Thornton's contemporary family portrait featuring their sons Daniel and Samuel on a seafront. (Haynes, 2013).

While David and Samantha Cameron have gone retro and quite formal with a black and white shot featuring daughter Florence. (Haynes, 2013).

Kidston trained as an interior designer under the society decorator Nicky Haslam before branching out on her own, and switched her attention to retailing after opening her first store in 1993. Selling vintage fabrics and salvaged furniture revived with a lick of brightly coloured paint, its wares were a hit with housewives in London's exclusive Holland Park neighbourhood. Then a mistake made during an order left her with more duvet covers than she could sell. Kidston took to her sewing machine and transformed the surplus bedlinen into cushions, washbags and padded coathangers, and the homewares business was born. (Garside, 2013b).

This printer was going to change my life. If nothing else, I could make a working gun with it.

That was three weeks ago. Today I am a broken man. My entire flat stinks of burnt plastic. My fingers are covered in cuts and scabs. If I ever hear the word "extruder" again, I'm going to slit my throat. My life has turned into a mangled CDT lab of confusion and frustration and microscopic foreign bodies that I'm pretty sure have lodged into my eyeball. (Heritage, 2013).

"I'm anti-consumerist, not pro-thrift. I love clothes but I don't want disposable clothes. It's about the pride of making stuff, rather than having stuff." (Brooks in Williams, 2013).

"I'm Fukuppy. Nice to meet you," the mascot says on the company's website. (McCurry, 2013b).

It's got no screen, does only one thing and – get this – it thinks it knows what you want to listen to. (Hepworth, 2013).

The BHF survey said just 36% of UK teenagers were deterred by current packs compared to 48% in Australia and that 77% of those quizzed in Britain thought the UK should have standardised packs. Australian teenagers supported the new packaging in their country (59%) and 66% wanted other countries to follow suit. (Meikle, 2013).

I prefer clothes that get better with age – cotton raincoats that get softer, moleskin that wears in well. We should respect what it takes to produce something that is of a quality to last, and I feel we should be thinking about that now, especially in terms of protecting the environment. (Howell, 2013).

Just before I leave, he tells me about his 2010 commission to redesign the England football shirt: he came up with the idea of multicoloured crosses of St George. "The red and white thing has been entirely marginalised by one kind of person. It's synonymous with an attitude that is naive, xenophobic, bullying and self-marginalising. I thought, that's not reflective of the team, or football, or of the nation at all. But it turns out the market for those shirts are those bloody-minded xenophobic individuals with the shaved heads. When it came out, they did not like it. They did not like it at all."

He laughs in manner that doesn't sound rueful or abashed so much as delighted. "Oh yeah," he nods, still laughing, "they fucking hated it." (Petridis, 2013).

'And my dream was always to build a design school that has all the different worlds that make you feel – from the design of clothes or a pair of sunglasses or shoes or bags, to furniture, architecture, web design, event design, physical space design, retail and offices, to packaging and video and photography, print, colour, textiles, music. Because they're all the senses.' (Bailey in Barton, 2013).