Taste, Sensibility, Judgment

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.