See my comment above on this, Maarten. I do think we might be seeing a shift in our profession, but am not sure if it is just a change in the title or the role. Changing the title could be a slippery slope for us that could eventually lead to refocusing the role. In short, I think we have, in many places, lost touch with the user experience and anything that moves us further away from that moves us in the wrong direction. I don’t really like the title, “Product Designer” because I feel what we say, how we label and categorize our world (i.e. what we call ourselves and how we label ourselves) can drastically alter our thinking.

A perfect example of how language, labels and categories alter our thinking can be found in Bowker and Star’s 1999 book, Sorting Things Out.