If you look at the steps being taken towards Scottish independence, they're being dealt with politically in very dull and boring ways. So if you just feverishly speculate numbered but random Scotlands - because in the book, it's a random sequence of possibilities - you can imagine many ways in which different things might happen.

I'm bored with DJs. Anybody that puts the title DJ in front of their name immediately turns me off. I prefer the term "sampling," because it has both the dilettante side, like someone tasting wine or caviar, but also functions as a kind of litmus paper dipped into culture. And the whole semi-legality of sampling is very interesting as well. So a DJ is not really creative enough for me to be an appropriate metaphor.

Franz Kafka once said that happiness consists in having an ideal and not progressing towards it. If you did progress towards it, you'd be unhappy because you'd never be able to reach it. You can incrementally improve your life, but you never quite experience the glamour. You never quite get to your utopia, or whatever it is. And once you realize that you can be quite Buddhist about it, and say, "Well, okay, I'm just going to keep detached from it all."

When you tell filthy jokes as if they were all really serious, and happening all in the life of one family, it becomes a farcical situation. Imagine if you had a script that was imposed on your life - we all do in a certain way, from society, or family, the need to make money, biology, death. But you will have a certain latitude, or freedom, to read the script in your own way.

Design is interesting because it's utopian. Art is often a jaundiced commentary on contemporary life. Design is always about the future; it's always about something great and new that's come out that will make the future brighter. It has this weird 18th - century positivism about it.

Maybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.

I enjoy the optimism of design, even though we can see it as doomed. But I'm telling most people that I'm not writing about design any more this year. It makes no sense at all during the recession unless you write about sustainable or ethical design-very basic things, like how to get clean water in countries with a shortage of it.