Design to consumer: I'm not sure we've met?

Itu Chaudhuri says designers can observe how people express themselves visually

Design, properly understood, is inherently social. Designers make things for the eventual use of other people, to fit into, or sometimes transform socially determined environments. So an invitation to “share a fresh perspective on consumers” at a conference, to an audience of marketers, should hardly have caused unease.  

But inquiry is born from unease; in this case, from Deep Design’s dawning realisation that designers don’t really deal with consumers. They aren’t trained for it.

Design, to use the current argot, deals with users, or humans — a carpenter using a drill, a reader scanning a newspaper page, book or website, a