Redbean - My sometimes partner in all things design, Joel Flom, has been doing a bit of navel gazing of late and has come up with an insightful and honest view of the whole design field.
He has noticed that the user-centred/interaction/experience/service/information design field can be a bit self-interested at times which leads to what I call Digital Noise. This noise gets the hip young things doing groovy design sites and products extremely excited and leaves their clients stone cold. Why? Mainly because they are speaking different languages. The former is focussed on the means and the latter is focussed on the end.
If you know the current version numbers to more than three or four applications and you can rattle off arcane designer speak (like iterative redundancy like) you are living in a sea of digital noise. To survive you may need to stick your head out and see what the humans are up to (that is the people who pay for your services). Then if you want to be successful build some bridges between the technical and the client needs without swamping them in noise. Simplify, simplify, simplify!
Google did a bit of street research recently where only 8% of people they asked knew what a browser was. They think Google is the browser because that is where they start. What that means is 92% of your prospective clients don’t know or care about how you do, only what you do, or really, only what it means to them.
http://elavision.typepad.com/elavision_insights/2009/06/design-is-a-verb.html