"design...means to make something look better for most people. A company invest or develop some new piece of electronic hardware. When it is finished it calls in a designer to wrap it up in a nice package. Then the company gets an engineer who understands how it works to write the instruction booklet. He suffers from the disease of familiarity, and so few customers really learn how to use the product. The designer picks the typefaces in that booklet and (maybe) put s a cover on it. The designer is not involved in the use, organization, or understanding of the instructions, except tangentially to make it easy to read."
This concept that Wurman describes; that the designer does not have control over how their design is used, is a concept that I have struggled with as a designer. My thought has always been, "If I design this, and it is marketing to an audience that I do not necessarily like, and then it is used for something I do not support, does that mean I support it?" My work is apart of the product, therefore my name is associated with it.
An "information architect" is a much better work for a designer pursuing clarity and readability. I think it is different than what we do as graphic designers, but I think the idea that we are adopting as 'human-centered design' is moving in the direction of this concept.
"How opposite is our life from what we have been taught"