It’s important to step away from technology when you’re designing but I agree it’s impossible to ‘turn off’ your intrinsic understanding of how things work.

It’s also important to think strategically when designing, and not to be afraid to throw away old designs and look freshly at a problem – you’re designing for context and use, not functionality per se.

That being said, it’s important to work closely with developers to ensure that designs can be implemented (even if you know it can, based on your own experience).

Hope that helps.

Boon

Would just like to add that for me personally, the CS-background skill I find most useful in my interaction design work is to sketch non-standard interactions by writing code. Last significant project I did in interactive visualization, for example, was driven to a great extent by software sketches. First Processing, later Actionscript.