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Last year for Big Arts Week, we got Stuart Lipton and Norman Foster to go into a school and get the seven- and eight-year-olds to do some architecture. The project: to design a new house for the Beckhams. The kids loved it, and drew on all the obvious sources – indoor football pitch, karaoke machine, lots of built-in wardrobes and the thrones.

It brought home to me that any organisation, including the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, that is trying to promote a social good such as better quality living environments, cannot ignore the zeitgeist created by our celebrity culture.

This reality, however superficial, creates a moral dilemma. Do we expend our efforts pushing at those markets that could help shift our culture in the direction we wish it to go, the same upper table that shifted our consumption patterns in food, clothing, cars and product design? The argument goes that this creates a trickle-down effect that will eventually be felt by those who have little or no choice. Or do we focus on seeking to improve the lot of the least well-off directly, following the general principle of using the taxpayers' money to secure a modicum of redistribution?

This dilemma is encapsulated in the Housing Corporation's intention to "kitemark" certain housebuilder housing layouts to speed up the approval of social housing schemes flowing from section 106. At first sight, this may seem a reasonable idea. In my experience, most social housing tenants aspire to what they perceive is the next rung up the ladder and to have a home that is similar to what most people enjoy – modern, comfortable, warm, safe. That is what the housebuilders provide, so follow the market.

Last year, volume housebuilders conducted a survey through their marketing board to find out which celebrity was associated by consumers with the image of a new standard home. The public selected Ulrika Jonsson. Now at first I thought this meant the homebuying public felt they had been duped into a misguided relationship and had ended up getting shafted, but apparently this was not the case. They saw Ulrika as an aspirational figure who represented the values they saw in buying a new home, presumably complete with Ikea furniture.

The public saw Ulrika Jonsson as an aspirational figure who represented the values they saw in buying a new home, complete with Ikea furniture

So why shouldn't social housing tenants have a piece of Ulrika, as it were? The first problem is that many of the standard housing types are actually not very good. A significant proportion of customers are dissatisfied with their new homes. Second, the state would be backing, often with taxpayers' cash, products that have not been tested in a properly competitive market. With two buyers for every new home erected in the south of the country, most housebuilders can put in just about what they like and it will still sell. And third, even where the builders get the houses right, the layouts often leave much to be desired in terms of inclusive, sustainable urban design.

The other side to this is that the best housing associations are already designing and building homes that are better than what many of the volume housebuilders are providing. To stem this tide of innovation in favour of directing public money to "could-be-anywhere" boxes seems misguided.

Now, to be fair to the corporation, the detail of this policy is still to be worked through and the noises I am hearing suggest that it will be discretionary. But whichever way you look at it, state endorsement of a bog-standard product is not going to help CABE persuade the volume housebuilding fraternity to up their game. The housing industry needs the prompt of innovation and risk that the social housing sector is able to provide.