Moving WebWord > Understanding Design Misfits is an good paper to read to get some thinking going on why design goes peculiar.
I'm not sure if it was quite fully thought out enough to be a paper-- it feels more like a long blog-- but that doesn't mean that some of the core ideas aren't excellent.
Personally I wrote the headings of a few of the more powerful notions on my whiteboard so I can evaluate against these criteria.. is the design insensitive? vestigal? over-adapted...?
IAWiki's been slowing down lately (other than folks filling in their bios) but a new addition makes it worth a visit...
Mongrel or Hybrid: The Role of Design in the Internet Age
"Mr. Glaze: Yes, graphic designers, who have a sense that "I do something very mysterious and complex that you can't do, and you couldn't possibly understand what I do, and therefore you need to orbit around me." That has always existed in the design community. I think from my standpoint, I won't tolerate it within my organization. I don't hire people that have that point of view.
Quite frankly the environment for designers now, for graphic designers, is such that they can't afford to take that position anymore and be successful at it. You won't see firms with that sort of the cult-of-personality approach to design in this economy, I don't think. It's required to be too collaborative, and no designer-graphic, information, anything else-has a grasp of all the issues required to execute successfully.
Now I would say, just in addition to that: a good graphic designer, in my opinion, understands information design and always has, even in the print world. Much of doing good print is understanding how information flows, how people move through it."