taste
musings on taste
sari and
taste
An entire metric of thought which is both impactful but also ignored
Taste – or lack of it – is the silent metric that permeates absolutely everything we create, and which has a far bigger bearing on success or failure than we’d care to admit.
The ability to intuitively discern the intrinsic harmony within something.
nature is intrinsically harmonious
how can you cultivate taste?
elevate your cultural diet so you can elevate your taste —> genre crossing ability.
View appreciation as a general skill
by learning to appreciate we learn to discern. by discerning we learn to decide. by deciding we learn to strategise.
Like many writers before me, I tend to lean on vague hand-waving when the need to define taste, or rather, good taste, arises. A common trope is to use the phrase US Supreme Court justice Stewart famously gave to describe obscenity, a similarly hard-to-describe bedfellow of taste, in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” In design, good taste can be... See more
Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It
Insight from Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast episode with the Collison brothers:
Software is this intersection between creative work and mechanical industrial work, which is why there's a lot of people who have tried to put $1 billion dollars into software but it hasn't resulted in high quality software.
... See more
Hannah Arendt called taste “the chief cultural activity,”
Taste is eating software. Taste is the new weapon.
Whether in design, branding, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed (whether it’s software or hardware or both). Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture. People now engage with technology as part of their... See more
Whether in design, branding, or user experience, taste now defines how a product is perceived and felt as well as how it is adopted, i.e. distributed (whether it’s software or hardware or both). Technology has become deeply intertwined with culture. People now engage with technology as part of their... See more
Computer scientist and technology blogger John Gruber on quality:
"The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge."
How to define what makes it so — think about quality in Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance — you know it when it’s there.
As AI democratise software creation, a world with a billion developers will not lack for builders as much as it will lack for artisans.