Taste

First of all, I would like to start by talking a little about Japan as it is today.

Great software is like a volume knob on an old hi-fi music system that feels well-tempered, well-oiled, with a satisfying touch, providing precision, reliability, and control. These knobs were a real sensation to touch and operate. Did they work better than standard knobs? Not really. Did they make the music sound better than crappy volume knobs? Not at all.

Only people who love volume knobs will care about volume knobs. People who love music don’t really care about the volume knobs. And among people who love software, only a few of them will genuinely care about its refinements. As long as it works, as long as it helps people do things, good enough is already plenty. A good tool is one that can help you do something faster, better. The materials of that tool, as long as it works, will only matter to snobs like me.

...A few years ago, I remember my friend Nabil replying to one of my iPhone home screen screenshots, saying something like, “Wow, you only have expensive apps on your home screen, so fancy!” So I guess I’m fancy when it comes to apps and software. I know that a great text editor won’t make me a better writer. Just like a premium car won’t get me to my destination faster because of speed limits. But sometimes it’s not about the outcomes, it’s about how you feel while achieving them.

The Apple co-founder and the super-producer share similar ideas regarding taste and creativity.

But over the past decade, Boston has fallen ill with a grave case of the Architecture of Right Now. Featureless glass — or even worse, plastic-cladded — high-rises in a minimalist or deconstructive style have been steadily replacing or crowding out beloved older buildings. As the new structures, which overwhelmingly lack traditional architectural elements or ornamentation, ooze across more of what used to be a defiantly unique cityscape, the overall effect is like that of being conquered by especially tasteless barbarians.

I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be.

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

How do you get from Bold to Beautiful?

You don’t get there with cosmetics, you get there by taking care of the details, by polishing and refining what you have. This is ultimately a matter of trained taste, or what German speakers call Fingerspitzengefühl (literally, “finger-tip-feeling”).

Of course, décor is not instant, not flat. It is produced as reactions to one’s interests and personal version of The World, and is also - at its best – the result of time passing and EVOLVING desires and things being accumulated to fill the emotional and practical needs of the time / a time.

Why is it that so much of what is commonly called AI “art” is kitsch? 

In part this is because users of AI image generators fancy themselves as artists even though few of them have any art training. This is common in photography. Wealthy individuals purchase camera gear based on reviews claiming that some camera or lens has greater technical abilities to reproduce reality faithfully and then apply complicated methods to assure that their photographs demonstrate technical proficiency. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is the leading example of this. Popular with amateurs with no aesthetic training, HDR is an attempt to capture a scene in which the range of luminance exceeds the dynamic range of the camera sensor, and often even the human eye itself. The results typically have too much detail in the shadows, dark skies, unnatural colors, the hyperrealistic effect of an acid trip. 

These sorts of photographers, along with individuals who produce digital illustrations for consumption on platforms like Artstation and DeviantArt, 3D printing enthusiasts, makers, indie musicians working with samplers and synthesizers, vloggers creating content for YouTube, gamers streaming on Twitch and YouTube, and fashion enthusiasts showcasing their work on social media are “prosumers,” a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave. Toffler’s “prosumer” merges the roles of producer and consumer, suggesting a shift in the economy and society. In this model, individuals are not only consumers of products and services but also take on an active role in their production. This concept was revolutionary at the time, predicting the rise of customization, personalization, and participatory culture facilitated by technological advancements, particularly in digital technology and the Internet.

At the same time, prosumers largely create kitsch, characterized by an appeal to popular tastes and a frequently derivative nature. Kitsch thrives in environments where production is geared towards mass appeal and immediate consumption rather than nuanced artistic merit or innovation. For traditional modernist critics, such as Clement Greenberg, kitsch represented the antithesis of genuine culture and the avant-garde. Kitsch, Greenberg explained in his seminal 1939 essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” is produced by industrialization, designed to satisfy the tastes of the least discerning audience without intellectual or emotional challenges. Greenberg associated kitsch with the replication of traditional art forms and aesthetics, but emptied of genuine meaning or complexity, offering immediate gratification rather than enduring value or depth.

Your first short story takes 10 days to write. The next one 5 days, the next one 2.5 days, the next one 1.25 days. Then 0.625 days, at which point you’re probably hitting raw typing speed limits. In practice, improvement curves have more of a staircase quality to them. Rather than fix the obvious next bottleneck of typing speed (who cares if it took you 3 hours instead of 6 to write a story; the marginal value of more speed is low at that point), you might level up and decide to (say) write stories with better developed characters. Or illustrations. So you’re back at 10 days, but on a new level.

This kind of improvement replaces quantitative improvement (optimization) with qualitative leveling up, or dimensionality increase. Each time you hit diminishing returns, you open up a new front. You’re never on the slow endzone of a learning curve. You self-disrupt before you get stuck.

The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function not of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.

Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?

A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.

And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.

And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is — and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say “well why is that important?” Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so that’s where one gets the idea. And if it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.

And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success — I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have that spirit either. But the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonald’s.

So that’s what saddens me — not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display more insight and more creativity.

A short clip from Gary Hustwit’s documentary "Rams".

Nevertheless, by the mid-aughts, curation was the thing. The list of late-Gen-X/early-millenial influencers that made their name on human scale curation is… not short! Did anyone mock them for doing something absurdly unscalable? No. Why? Because they never said they were trying to map the web. The whole point of curation is choice; it’s saying, “Of all the things, I have chosen these.” You cannot search for what you don’t know exists. That’s curation.

Post-algorithm curation was all about technology versus taste.

For me, this was a very good time for the web, and for people. Yes, some became famous for their taste. Some of them even became rich. I don’t have a problem with that. Because at the root of it was something I deeply value and hold dear as a distinction between human and machine: curiosity. You can write an algorithm to act as if it is curious, but you cannot create it to be so. At least not yet.

We are in this cycle again...No one person sets the pace of the web. But one person should set the pace of their experience of it.

The way I revise is: I read my own text and imagine a little meter in my head, with “P” on one side (“Positive”) and “N” on the other (“Negative”)... This involves making thousands of what I’ve come to think of as “micro-decisions.” These are instantaneous, intuitive – I just prefer this to that… I just have a feeling and react to that feeling, in the form of a cut phrase, or an added word, or an urge to move this whole section, and so on. And then I do that over and over, for months, sometimes years, until that needle stays up in the “P” zone for the whole length of the text…With each choice, even the smallest ones, the story becomes more and more…well, it becomes more her, you could say. There’s more of her essential nature in it, more of what will distinguish her from all of those other writers out there. And gradually, the story starts to become something she couldn’t have foreseen when she started out – bigger, more complex, smarter, funnier, whatever.

If you’ve interacted in the product strategy sessions, you’ll find I’ve historically been opposed to A/B testing - to running behavioral experiments.

...Now you might ask, why would I be opposed to such a thing within our product? There are many, many reasons I am opposed, but the one we should care about is how it fosters a culture of decision paralysis. It fosters a culture of decision making without having an opinion, without having to put a stake in the ground. It fosters a culture where making a quick buck trumps a great product experience. That goes wildly against our core values, how we built Sentry, and what we want Sentry to be. Pixels Matter, one of our core values, is centered around caring about the small details, and that by its very nature is subjective. What details? Which ones matter? Those decisions all center on taste, and around someone making a subjective decision.

Most AI images look like shit. AI “artists” are quick to lecture me that generative tools are improving every day and what they spit out won’t always look this way – I think that’s beside the point. What makes AI imagery so lousy isn’t the technology itself, but the cliché and superficial creative ambitions of those who use it. A video of a cyber-punk jellyfish or a collie in sunglasses on a skateboard generated by Open AI’s new video-to-text model Sora aren’t bad because the animals in them look unrealistic; they’re bad because they’re mind-numbingly stupid. AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

How could this come to be? Are there good reasons—like it is better to release something initially that is not so good but on the right track and then let a community of inhabitants repair it using piecemeal growth? Or maybe it’s that lower cost, otherwise less effective technologies eventually push out overpriced and over-engineered competitors? Or is it that quality is like Vietnamese poetry and thus rarely appreciated? Is it really the statement of the base nature of human taste?

What we’ve reviewed here suggests to me that among the groups of students who are talented enough to get positions where they work with Nobel laureates, the quality of mentor probably matters a lot (at least if you care about making outsized scientific impact).

Perhaps that’s not surprising. After all, doing high impact innovation often means understanding something that few others do; otherwise, someone else would have invented or discovered the thing before you. How does a great student learn something that few others know?

...Highly innovative people, willing to take on apprentices, but who have not yet settled down to write textbooks seem like a good bet.

Develop Your Own Taste
Non-Obvious Ideas Take a Long Time to Win
Structure and Constraints Breed Creativity
Listen and Observe
Creativity Requires Different Speeds
The Best Want to Work with The Best
Getting Full Creative Control
Create Your Own Luck

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about intellectual property and the underlying moral and legal issues. In blogging and tweeting about these thoughts, I’ve tended to use the word “borrow”, but at times I’ve used the word “steal” to assert the implicit moral judgment.

...In dancing around the moral and semantic differences between borrowing and stealing, I’ve been missing the greater point. Elliot used the word steal, not for its immoral connotation, but to suggest ownership. To steal something is to take possession of it.

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

The labile tastes of certain decision-makers in a company are often a great burden for designers. Too many feel themselves qualified to pass judgment. And how insensitive, how superficial these judgments often are.

Taste, believes Rams, is something that needs to be trained, since the aesthetic decisions at this level in product design are intrinsically bound to the entire form and function of the object. It would be unimaginable, for example, that the management of an aerospace company would ask the designers of a new plane to shorten the wings because they think it would make it look prettier.

How do you describe the design of the stuff all around you, beyond what you like or don’t like, beyond what’s interesting or cool or boring?

While it’s probably one of the corniest things I’ll ever write in this column, I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not because someone you respect likes them, but because you simply can’t look away. Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.

From the March 8, 2023 edition.

👟 John bought a pair of new Scarpa running shoes. I had never heard of these before, but they look pretty cool.
🪔 Thomas turned up his cozy vibe with his new desk lamp.
🏃 Adil also got some new running shoes! Unlike John, he went for the Hoka Speedgoat 4!
👃 Megan likes to make skincare products and she’s been loving the Guaiac Forest oil!
🌈 Tom ordered the Philips Hue Gradient Lightstrip for his office. I’ve actually been eyeing this for a while too!
📚 Roy finally received his Shift Happens books, and can’t wait to dig into them!
🇧🇷 And I was gifted a set of glasses from Brazil called "Copo Americano". Designed in 1947 and with over 6 billion units produced, they're an absolute icon. Thanks Bruno!

You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art. Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go. Really push the boundaries and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it. But you can’t get there the other way. The other way is a dead-end path.

A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any conviction, with one eye always over your shoulder. After a while these self-doubting platitudes become road bumps that get in the way of describing the thing that you love.

The Silicon Valley giants, testifying with their runaway success, claimed to have “solved” design as an engineering problem. The solution substituted the human essence of design — intuition, ingenuity, and taste— with the tangibles, measurables, and deliverables.

Companies say they are “design-driven”, but designers are actually driven by dashboards filled with metrics like CSAT, NPS, CES, DAU, MAU. We rigorously run tests, studies, experiments as if innovative ideas are hidden in spreadsheets, waiting to be extracted by data scientists.

Memory is fallible and degrades surprisingly quickly. Relying on your memory too much in your work leads to errors, both because your recall can be wrong, but also because software changes. What you remember might not be correct any more.

What’s more important is gut feeling. The human mind is great at spotting patterns and deviations from patterns…Don’t memorise the words. Look at the code. Treat the code like a food or drink you want to savour. Swish it in your mouth and remember the feeling that nice code gave you.

I’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person.

The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product.

Observe the interior and exterior, the furniture and textile decoration
following such color schemes, as well as commercialized color “suggestions”
for innumerable do-it-yourselves.

Our conclusion: we may forget for a while those rules of thumb
of complementaries, whether complete or “split”, and of triads and
tetrads as well.
They are worn out.

Second, no mechanical color system is flexible enough
to precalculate the manifold changing factors, as named before,
in a single prescribed recipe.

Good painting, good coloring, is comparable to good cooking.
Even a good cooking recipe demands tasting and repeated tasting
while it is being followed.
And the best tasting still depends on a cook with taste.

By giving up preference for harmony,
we accept dissonance to be as desirable as consonance.

Besides a balance through color harmony, which is comparable
to symmetry, there is equilibrium possible between
color tensions, related to a more dynamic asymmetry.

Again: knowledge and its application is not our aim;
instead, it is flexible imagination, discovery, invention – taste.

One is reminded in this connection of a story concerning Kobori-Enshiu. Enshiu was complimented by his disciples on the admirable taste he had displayed in the choice of his collection. Said they, "Each piece is such that no one could help admiring. It shows that you had better taste than had Rikyu, for his collection could only be appreciated by one beholder in a thousand." Sorrowfully Enshiu replied: "This only proves how commonplace I am. The great Rikyu dared to love only those objects which personally appealed to him, whereas I unconsciously cater to the taste of the majority. Verily, Rikyu was one in a thousand among tea masters."

A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste may not change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disbelief.

Our understanding of the psychology of taste can in turn help us to escape from the two great dogmas of aesthetics: the view that there is only one acceptable visual style or (even more implausibly) that all styles are equally valid.