Sorry that I don't have time to do this (these) conversation(s) justice. I'll try to avoid being sucked into the whole exclusive title thing. Here's something I wrote about (graphic) designer certification twenty years ago: http://www.gunnarswanson.com/writing/Certification.pdf
I will point out that certification (or parallel modes of distinction) should start with the question "What is being certified?" If the only purpose is restraint of trade, legal challenges and a connected world almost certainly dooms any such efforts. If there are specific abilities to be certified, I wonder whether certifying them specifically rather than looking for a general "designer" standard makes more sense. To fully practice some sorts of design, one would need a bunch of these certifications--something like Boy Scout merit badges. For the work that many designers do, the banditos in 'Treasure of the Sierra Madre' had it right: "We don't need no stinking badges."
The sketching question is interesting but I think it has several fibers that wind together to become what seems to be a single thread. One is professional tradition. As the 73rd least nostalgic person you'll ever meet, I just ignore tradition questions for the most part.
Another is professional tools. In many design fields, sketching is still the best way to quickly communicate with others in a manner that allows broad freedom of form. That's not true for all design fields and will likely reduce in the future as automated replacements for sketching become available. I won't predict the demise of sketching for a lot of reasons including my track record on predictions having been just about as bad as most futurists'. (Interesting comments on sketching, Victor. Thanks.)
Another is communication that happens with the designer and the sketch. Sketching, printing. . . rapid prototyping of every sort are possible ways of having real stuff be part of the conversations that happen within design teams, within design teams defined broadly to include clients and other stakeholders, and in the individual designer's thinking. I tell my students that I could be replaced by a parrot that says "Make it real. Make it now." Sketching is one form of making it real and it does the "now" part better than many alternatives.
I'm slowly getting to what I meant to be the topic of this post: Teena's " Perhaps this is a phd topic for someone (else!)?" I second that motion. Punya's education ties make me hope he'll recruit someone to deal with some of this (particularly, I hope, the whole thinking through making thing and its implications for education.)
Punya wrote "I pilfer ideas from the design literature and bring it to bear on my research and scholarship on educational psychology and technology. And that has led to a reasonably productive and successful academic career. I often joke that my career is based mainly on the fact that most of my colleagues in education do NOT read outside the education literature—which makes my bringing in of ideas from other fields (usually design) appear far more creative than it really is." I hope he keeps it up (and I hope he points us toward ed lit that might enlighten our thinking about design.)
If anyone is working on this in education, please connect them with me.
I disagree with the notion that such transfer is uncreative. The essence of creativity is picking something up in one place an putting it down in another. The discussion of why we see it as creative in one case and why we see it as parasitic in another is more than I have time for right now but I would argue that much of what gets seen as not creative (or even an affront to creativity) is unfairly condemned as such.
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
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Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
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