I can say that most design decisions are made for a specific reason. Mostly they are made to make the design a good design (by the designer's definition), and usually the process of building is secondary. If the design idea is good enough they will find a way to make it. That said, different building methods may suggest design ideas so there is a feed-back loop.

Hi, Nick - yes, absolutely. I hope it's clear that the intent of my questions isn't to imply that the folks here haven't thought things through, or that I think I have some better way of doing things. I just still have that "3 year old child" brain where I have to ask "why" - I like to understand the design considerations that went into a decision, why you did it one way and not some other way. It's basically what I do for a living - clients come to me saying "I need an iPad application that does such-and-such" and I then do "discovery" where I generally learn that what they actually need is considerably different from what they said they needed, and what they said they want is nothing at all like what we should actually build.

Anyway - I'm expecting delivery of your book tomorrow - I should probably just shut up until after I've finished reading it.