The problem with design isn't the designers. It's the clients.
Designers can only aim to produce work that challenges "constraints, organisational politics" if the client will allow them to. Very few will. You can explain until you're blue in the face that they're shooting themselves in the foot, but in any organization the easiest and safest thing to do career-wise is to avoid rocking the boat, so very few clients are willing to push back on all the different internal pressures that hobble their projects. It's easier to just accept them and deliver the best thing their internal dysfunctions will allow.
(This is as true for consulting coders as it is for consulting designers, btw. Even the original consultant, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, could never get the London police to take his word for things.)
And it's easier for designers to go along with that too than it is to refuse to work for clients who insist on shooting themselves in the foot. But it's hard to blame them. Designers gotta eat too, you know? I mean, you can play Howard Roark and refuse to work on anything that's in any way compromised, but since reality isn't a bad novel you may find yourself going your whole life without ever finding a client who meets your standards. And is a brilliant designer who never got around to designing anything really better in the final analysis than a brilliant designer who designed a bunch of nearly-great-but-sadly-compromised things? I dunno.
Have fun convincing designers to embrace A/B testing. They have to change their whole process, including how they deal with clients. Most will only do it once the design is finished to test minor differences.
Designers can only aim to produce work that challenges "constraints, organisational politics" if the client will allow them to. Very few will. You can explain until you're blue in the face that they're shooting themselves in the foot, but in any organization the easiest and safest thing to do career-wise is to avoid rocking the boat, so very few clients are willing to push back on all the different internal pressures that hobble their projects. It's easier to just accept them and deliver the best thing their internal dysfunctions will allow.
(This is as true for consulting coders as it is for consulting designers, btw. Even the original consultant, Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, could never get the London police to take his word for things.)
And it's easier for designers to go along with that too than it is to refuse to work for clients who insist on shooting themselves in the foot. But it's hard to blame them. Designers gotta eat too, you know? I mean, you can play Howard Roark and refuse to work on anything that's in any way compromised, but since reality isn't a bad novel you may find yourself going your whole life without ever finding a client who meets your standards. And is a brilliant designer who never got around to designing anything really better in the final analysis than a brilliant designer who designed a bunch of nearly-great-but-sadly-compromised things? I dunno.