taste

As Arnold Bennett famously said, ‘Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.

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

While in theory the notion of Quality might appear rather philosophical and idealistic, in practice it could not be more pragmatic. One can think of Quality as simply the highest -leverage input into a system. F or illustrative purposes we could envision a continuum of layers starting with a company’s high -level outputs: financial figures and key ... See more

I mentioned that implicit conviction “comes from something deeper than the cause and effect we perceive in the unfolding of events.” What exactly is this deeper -something? My first attempt to answer this question happened spontaneously, over a decade ago: “Some companies have a soul,” I found myself saying to a friend over lunch, “others are just ... See more

Interestingly, I also find that experiencing Quality i n any one domain (e.g., music or meditation, to use examples that are dear to me) can be helpful for recognizing it in other domains (including business) because Quality’s nature is universal, even as its manifestations are necessarily particular.

Quality emerges from the complexity of the system in action ; it is in the how rather than the what. Thus, when Quality is broken down into parts and analyzed, its essence is lost. This explains why analysis alone has trouble discerning the authentic from the artific ial. Moreover, Quality frozen in a theory or process cannot be recognized in suffi... See more

When I’m traveling, I like to bring back one thing where I say, This could only exist here . As unattainable as it may seem, I want to have things in my life where I say, ‘I can’t link to this. I came upon it by chance, it’s imperfect, it has a soul, and probably no one else has it.’”

Blackbird Spyplane: The unlinked thing with a soul. It can feel

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Alison Roman: “People are so brand-conscious now, and I think they’ve become that way about food. ‘Are those the Fishwife anchovies?’ No, it’s Cento. Or some Spanish brand you’ve never heard of, but it’s the same anchovies inside the tin. People are too conscious about choosing the ‘right’ thing that signifies their taste level, or who they are as

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Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail. How has your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what caused you ... See more