Ralph Caplan writes in AIGA Voice about how he wonders why graphic designers are smart even when they don't have to go to smart schools to learn to be smart, instead just having to go to schools where they learn how to make things. While conceding that he's implying that he is very smart in being able to tell who else is smart. The crux, as we see it:

Men and women, boys and girls, gravitate to design for any number of reasons; but common to all of them is the itch to make something--a picture, an artifact, a plan. That itch is satisfied by drawing, carving, shaping, molding--somehow using the hand to realize a concept in the mind.

If designers are more cerebral than expected, it may be because designing is more cerebral than expected. In an age when digital no longer refers to fingers, the work of the designer is no longer hands-on. That regrettable circumstance becomes truly deplorable with the realization that hands-on is never all that far from heads-on.

Dude.