You should visit Tin's favourite (and now legendary) eaterie, Gostionica Tip-Top on Gunduliceva 18, where you'll enjoy photos of the poet, go goggle-eyed at the intimate, socialist design, including a dozen glass-bowl lamps overhead, and relish a Dalmatian cuisine of fresh fish (£40/kilo), octopus risotto (from £6), fine island wines, and the chocolate-and-walnut 'Marco Polo' desert.
The Palace of Culture and Science (00 48 22 656 6234; pkin.pl), Poland's tallest building, was a controversial gift from Stalin, and stands as a striking example of socialist realist design.
Architects incorporated regional building traditions in their socialist modern designs, including the visually intriguing facade mosaics attributed to the little-known Zharsky brothers.
He donated pictures to raise money for the Republicans in the Spanish civil war, but also laid himself open to Bawden's teasing that, though he was supposedly a "socialist", he designed the Wedgwood coronation mug (an excuse for indulging his love of drawing fireworks).
In a sort of socialist franchising, the design was coupled to the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and ideologically aligned nations, including China and North Korea.
Socialist fashion was designed and promoted through the central fashion institutions, which commanded the best addresses in the socialist capitals and employed hundreds of staff, who enjoyed perks such as foreign travel and access to western magazines.
And while Morris, a socialist, developed medieval designs to protest manufacturing-era values, Wheeler embraced industrialism, printing on humble blue denim, and manufacturing a fabric with metallic weave she called "cloth of gold".
I hypothesize that this balance was possible due to NER's methodological ability to experiment with form by creating legible images and by taking the idea of a socialist city as a design problem.
At the end of the 1990s, the Socialist government attempted to design a police force that would have more contact with and therefore more proximity to the population, an initiative that was quickly thwarted by the right's rise to power and the resistance on behalf of police hierarchies and unions.
Created as a commentary on the homogenous design of socialist architecture, it appropriates the blocky aesthetic into a humorous game of Tetris.
Other domains such as art, architecture, urban planning, cooperative and socialist planning, management, participatory design and cultural studies - as well as approaches in medicine, healthcare and science - corroborate our choices.
