I think this is going to a totally wrong direction. Saying things like: “I design for markets” and “I make stuff sell” is exactely what I mean by saying that I have the feeling that designers start to adjust to the perception what outsiders think designers have to do/are doing. Designers are not (!) just cohorts of some corporate racketeers. Designing crap doesn’t mean you are “versatile”! It either means you are more of a salesman instead of a designer or you are simply in no position to stand up against this kind of bad styling.
And saying things like: “it’s what people want!” also doesn’t count. People buy lots and lots of crap. Look at all that Chinese plastic stuff that is flooding every single market on this world. People buy that. They just don’t care.
But that doesn’t justify designing trivial stuff. Almost ANYTHING sells if you do it right. Let me dig out this Henry Ford quotation one more time: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
I agree, I didn’t want to say it like that, because people here already think I am an overly idealistic nutcase 
But meaning is probably the best word to describe what design is all about. It is not about form, nor function alone. It is basically about meaning. What does a product symbolize? iab likes pre-war Italian bikes because of what they stand for and for the emotion they evoke when thinking about that time. Would you still like them if they were mid-war nazi bikes instead of pre-war Italian bikes and Adolf Hitler himself claimed that this sort of bikes are his favourite? Probably not
Honest products are always a reflection of the time they were designed in to the point where they disappear from the markets. From that moment on they represent obsolete values. Their symbolic meaning is shifting. Driving a VW Beetle today says something different about you than driving one 40 ears ago. Another good example for that might be the famous IKEA billy bookshelf. Carpenters built bookshelves like that for decades before billy. But their work won’t be remembered. But Billy will. Billy will not be remembered because of its clean Scandinavian lines or something like that. It will be remembered for its representation of the phenomenon of globalization. It just reflects that in every way. The cheap price to make it “for everybody”, its genericness that it fits into almost every single home from New York to Stockholm to Shanghai. The industrial efficiency you can see in the way it is produced, packed and distributed. There even is a billy-index to measure the PPP of different countries. All that together makes a product like billy truly contemporary, honest and RELEVANT.
GE on the other hand managed to produce something truly irrelevant. All they are doing is cashing in on the symbolic meaning of other, obsolete products. There is just not meaning, no background. It is like telling a fairy-tale, but in a very very bad and unauthentic way. “Back in my days…”
Just yesterday the verge linked to a very well written article about skeuomorphism in Interfaces that is making points that are quite close to the discussion that is going on here. Worth a read
Authentic design aims to pierce through falsehood and do away with superfluousness. Authentic design is about using materials without masking them in fake textures, showcasing their strengths instead of trying to hide their weaknesses. > Authentic design is about doing away with features that are included only to make a product appear familiar or desirable but that otherwise serve no purpose. > Authentic design is about representing function in its most optimal form, about having a conviction in elegance through efficiency. Authentic design is about dropping the crutches of external ornament and finding beauty in pure content.
In authentic design, style is not unimportant, but it is not pursued through decoration. > Rather, beauty of form depends on the content, with the style being a natural outcome of a creative solution> . As Deyan Sudjic commented on the design of the iconic Anglepoise lamp, “How the lamp looks — in particular the form of its shade — was something of an afterthought. But that was part of its appeal. Its artless shape gave it a certain naive innocence that suggested authenticity, > just as the early versions of the Land Rover had the kind of credibility that comes with a design based on a technically ingenious idea rather than the desire to create a seductive consumer product.”