Okay, a week of talking about design

I'm in one of those moods where I want to think about design as a practise and a professional (most readers of this blog will stop reading at this point I would guess, but try to bear with me please). I've been reading Natalia Ilyin's Chasing the Perfect "Thoughts on Modernist Design in Our Time". So I'll start with a long quote. Here is Ilyin's account of going to visit an up and coming New York furniture designer - with a view to a job doing his PR: He started talking about why he had stared the company and about a $10,000 black-walnut side table he was just producing and about what he thought design was and this sort of thing, and he really was a very charming guy, and at some point we went to the all-white laminated kitchen tucked around a corner and he made me a nice Illy espresso. I was just standing there, mentally calculating the price of his trousers and of his black cashmere mock-turtle and adding it to what his cost per foot must have been, including escalations, when he suddenly said, "I had a customer come to me the other day and ask me to design a sofa." "Oh?" I said. "Well, you know. I just laughed. Just laughed!" Here he chuckled in a dry sort of way, so I chuckled dryly, too, having no idea what was so damn funny about designing a sofa. "So you don't design sofas?" I asked, in a leading sort of way. The designer looked at me and let out a low moan. He leaned heavily against the wall near the espresso machine. His trousers creaked mournfully. "People sit on sofas," he said.