Who owns design?

If you aren't reading "Campbell on Branding on Innovation" add it to your feed reader now. Jon Campbell is just starting out in the Master of Design Methods program at IIT Institute of Design and his blog records his experience. Today's post "Who gets to be part of design?" is in response to a conversation over at Bruce Nussbaum's Business Week design (er, innovation) blog about what defines a designer.

As I read across a lot of different sources, there is a school of thought in what I'd call the traditional design community that all these business folks marching into the design world are a bad thing and that designers are defined by their tools and their deliverables/outputs/artifacts (see, I have a hard time even describing things that way) rather than a way of thinking, a process, a methodology. I'd imagine those sorts of words scare the heck out of some traditional designers, and maybe they should. This seems to indicate the first rumbling so the design/innovation backlash, which is only natural as previously disparate and separated cultural groups start mixing it up and thinking about a new way forward. The new way forward always incorporates an implicit criticism of the old way forward, so resistance is expected. As Campbell points out, the best way to figure things out is to just start doing, reacting, modifying, trying again. Which is design thinking, anyway, isn't it?