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
taste > skills
taste seems more scarce these days, and increasingly differentiating in the age of AI where so much of skills-based productivity is offloaded to compute.
makes me think about the development of taste, and how we nurture taste for the next gen of humans.
One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more
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.
in the age of AI being able to select from the vast sea of possibilities becomes the most important skill.
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