The matter of taste — Callum Flack

What most of us lack in order to be artists, is not the inceptive emotion, nor yet merely technical skill in execution. It is capacity to work a vague idea and emotion over into terms of some definite medium. John Dewey, Art as Experience

Rather than understanding taste as the particular way a person does a thing, I will argue that taste is a measurement of how well a person is able to see and act within a problem space. That it is the ability to skip ahead over previously assimilated decisions to get to the heart of a matter. And that the process of doing this over and over within a domain turns the many small insights made into a muscle memory of shortcuts that are stored as aesthetic feelings, away from the cognitive expense of language and reason. Much more than just a style of doing, good taste is a measure of a person’s intuitive understanding of a problem space.

#Taste matters because it creates differentiation

A differentiated product is “better” in some way, but all too often putting your finger on exactly what is better is a frustrating exercise. Ben Thompson, Selling Feelings

Given our revised definition of taste as a unit of creative problem-solving ability, the question is, so what? Why does taste matter? As software destroys, transmutes and unbundles markets into recursively smaller niches, the user experience of these products becomes a major battleground for competitive differentiation. When all is said and done, a successful product will be decided by how well the product’s interfaces make people feel. A frustrating interface will be dismissed, and a satisfying interface will create a customer.

But what makes an interface successful? Beyond speed of performance, cohesive information sequences and anticipation of the human context and need, designing an experience that hopes to create feeling can only be done with feeling. The difference between good and bad becomes a matter of who can bring to bear greater focus and knowhow within the problem space. It becomes a matter of who can build with better taste.

#Taste is a measure of cultivated attention

Because information grows through human use, problem spaces have infinite depth. After deliberate practice within a problem space over long periods of time, what we have learned is assimilated into aesthetic intuitions. If intuitions are made of knowhow1 that don’t need to be encoded into language, then taste is made of libraries of intuition.

Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience. Rita Mae Brown

These libraries help us shortcut logic and leap over the decisions we’ve already converted into taste so we can immerse ourselves deeper into the problem and see evermore clearly what matters. In this way, taste is a process of compression and acceleration through cultivated attention.

#Taste creates the competitive advantage of perspective

I think this place is beautiful, if you look at it right. David Lynch

Taste is stored at a pre-linguistic, pre-logical stage, and is understood as an emotional feeling before we can talk about it. Beauty is also understood in this manner. In fact, the two are often confused because good taste is more often than not beautiful. But beauty is not taste. Beauty signals rich information that is worth paying attention to. Whereas taste informs the creation of new information based on a history of previous attention.

Taste, like beauty, is misunderstood. And I think that’s because it’s difficult to rationalise. Even though we aren’t rational at all, we like to think we are. As a result, anything that’s hard to describe in words, we don’t trust. And taste is difficult to describe in words. We only get things like taste and beauty when we’re receptive to our intuition and curiosity.

PayPal was a very friendly name. It was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name. It was the music sharing site. You nap some music, you nap a kid. That sounds like a bad thing to be doing. Peter Thiel

The simplicity of understanding in Thiel’s quote hides a receptivity to aesthetics, which we’re used to rationalising away. We make them all the more powerful when we fail to notice them as rich information in plain sight. As we increasingly live our lives reacting to an attention deficit, we tend to fill the empty moments where previously feeling emerged. But that does not prevent most of our decisions being post-rationalised based on barely conscious gut feelings. We are parsing aesthetics and heeding them as emotions as automatically as we digest food. We may not be able to describe in words what we want, yet we know it when we see it. And I venture, in broader terms, we know it when we feel it.

When you have a cultivated your attention for a problem space so deeply that you’ve turned your knowhow into feeling—what German speakers call fingerspitzengefühl, translated literally as finger-tip-feeling—then you have created for yourself the competitive advantage of...