Designers - Are You Influenced By What You Read?

Silent_E asks: "A student of mine is writing a paper on how Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_ offers a good educational model for distance learning. She has been asked by publishers to justify looking at fiction as a way of talking about 'the real world.' That dialogue made me wonder whether Slashdot folks currently or recently coding or doing hardware design are, or have been, directly inspired by what they've read in Science Fiction?"