Business needs a focued, stable understanding of the discipline, its practices and its results in order to know how and when to use it in pursuit of particualr business goals.

However designers violently resist such definitions, perfering to leave things open and vague, and commit to nothing. This is the cloak that hides design’s dirty little secret: most designers don’t know what they’re talking about, and as long as there are no stable defintions of design, they can just keep on talking. And folks like Tom Peters and Bruce Nussbaum only exacerbate this problem.

John Carroll offers one of the most lucid descriptions of design as a practice in the first couple chapters of his book “Making Use.” Ironic that a non-designer better describes design than any designer or design academic.

Perhaps you sense my frustration with my profession?

So somewhere there is a disconnect. How can something be true of a profession, but not true of most of its professionals?

The answer I think is in the deign discipline’s lack of, well, discipline and rigour. Critical thinking is not conidered relevant in design education. Nor is any business training. And so the profession is filled with posers and hacks, and neither understands itself nor its potential value.

Its ironic that non-designers (like you, Richard Florida, Tom Peters, etc) have a more sophisticated idea of what design is than most designers.