I agree with the overall point that design is about more than looks, but my impression is that design as practiced by the IDEO / Stanford d.school / design thinking crowd is a quite different beast from what’s being taught inside most architecture schools.

The former tries to distill design into a largely linear, repeatable process (that can be peddled by consultants, if I’m being a bit cynical), the latter would characterize such approaches as reductionist and limiting.