Core77

Kevin McCullagh wrote, on these pages,

So just as critics from outside design are sharpening their knives, designers are becoming racked with self-doubt and -loathing. We have surfed the wave of adoring interest, but the shifts that have taken place have left designland in intellectual disarray and in bad shape to defend itself. First, the frontiers of design have expanded well beyond its traditional heartland. From championing design thinking in the boardroom to the re-engineering of public sector services, 'design'-often practised by people without a design training-now encompasses a far wider spectrum of activity. Second, the old certainties of disciplinary boundaries appear increasingly blurred and irrelevant. For example, when designing an experience that includes product, service, communication and retail elements, the coherence of the experience matters much more than breaking it down into individual disciplines.
...
If we intend to sidestep the backlash, we need to develop a point-of-view on whether we're going to defend design in all of its guises or just particular areas. It's time to draw some distinctions between which we want to support and which deserve the lash.

And in the recent Down with Innovation, Rick Poynor contends

Having written off designers as mere stylists with insufferable egos, whose sole aim is to impose their impractical excesses on long-suffering consumers whom they never trouble to consult, the way is clear for a new breed of intermediary to step up and take business's hand. They might once have called themselves design consultants-the rhetoric is not so different-but today they are known as design thinkers and innovation experts. For these design-ovators, everything is subordinate to strategy. Design is one small cog in an elaborate analytical machine intended to dazzle prospective clients into believing that they are dealing with rigorous professionals who work with precise methodologies and defined, quantifiable outcomes.

These sort of articles make for interesting case studies in persuasive writing. McCullagh writes from inside the design community, acknowledging the changes and the challenges. Everything is not peachy but he's asking for help, inclusively. Poynor stands inside the same circle, but he positions those he disagrees with as necessarily outside his world. He frames this as an "us" and "them" dynamic (or to be fair, is perhaps simply extending that dynamic as he's been experiencing it).

We believe that hand-wringing about disciplinary identities and boundaries can be healthy (up to a point, as long as one keeps in mind that few others really give a crap), but that territorial pissing and hot-blooded pot-shots may not accomplish as much as hoped. Who will establish a forum (using that term in the broadest sense) for exploring common spaces between these schools of thought?

Image: Hands Across The Divide, sculpture, by Maurice Harron, Derry