design is increasingly an exercise in consensus building (with a few super-votes).
or does it secretly involve doing all the research, running user interviews, thinking hard about it independently, pre-conceiving an optimal proposal and recognizing a few false starts and dead-ends to avoid, and then slowly steering a client to that same conclusion such that it seems like a foregone conclusion, using cycles of user testing, feedback, and refinement to optimize the product? good designers can make you feel smart; great designers can make you forget them entirely?