[01001010]

Not at all my experience. Interruptions when designing is, to me, almost free. It's a completely different mental process at work compared to programming. One which does not need much wind-up time at all.

I wouldn't say creative work and "create new things that don't exist yet" is what's defining for expensive interruptions. Rather, whether you need to keep a lot of stuff in mental cache or not. That is not true for a large subset of design work.

Edit: My personal experience is that interruptions during design work is, in contrast, almost welcome. Once you come back to your designs after an interruption you often see things in a new light and catch stuff you previously didn't see.

[bryanrasmussen]

Yeah designing generally has the benefit that when you look back at what you've been working on the whole thing can be taken in at once, in other creative fields you have lost the context and what you were thinking about - you need to go back and look things over.