Developing Taste
emilkowal.ski
emilkowal.ski
I hope we as a community can develop the new agile or some sane process to ground ourselves in sooner than later...
No more than N% of the time should a notification be pending. Probably under 5%. Otherwise a notification is the wrong tool for the job. You need an inbox.
Another point which may apply is to purposefully engage with work you don't like, because if you can figure out why it sucks, it'll help you make work that doesn't suck!
Here's an example of rebranding Uhaul. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cMU0G8h0pys
> it’s a trained instinct. The ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates. It’s why some designs feel effortless.
This is not really what "taste" is.
Some designs feel effortless because someone practiced/trained so they could execute on their taste. Taste is extremely cheap - execution is still very hard.
Quality doesn't enforce itself and using soft language allows mediocrity to hide itself in it.
You've introduced a category that could be described as an alias for "bad", and then you threw in random stuff into that, based on unclear and handwavy criteria.
This can only end in a screaming match, so let's not do that.
I'm curious, though: How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance? Do you have examples of such a behavior?
> How would you picture protecting taste while at the same time adopting an inclusive (as in not putting people off) stance?
I don't, because I reject the definition.
Being inclusive does not mean "not putting people off". For starters, because measuring there doesn't work. How people react is not a direct reproducible consequence of your actions. Your actions might influence it, but they have this ginormous internal state that has much more control over it.
But that is a side-track.
The actual problem with the definition is that putting people off isn't bad.
Putting people off for arbitrary reasons like race, gender, etc is, but that "arbitrary reasons" is a strong modifier that significantly limits the set, and was dropped in your framing.
This is AI-generated.
Example: only someone who fetishized design would make a keyboard the didn't work just so it could be a mm thinner.
The best designs come from those who interview, research, and test with a broad and representative sample of real users.
So … designers?
I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
>I would bet that is what real users have been asking for, for decades now. They aren't asking for swappable batteries or headphone jacks.
Well isn't it telling that Apple hasn't focused on thinner and lighter than what is currently available for 5 years now?
Their actions seem to indicate that they heard this desire loud and clear, and that this caused a single-minded focus that lost the plot on the overall functionality part of the role of design. And then they heard lound and clear from users that "thinner than what came before" was not the end-all-and-be-all. They also rolled back other victims of the "as thin and liught as possible" chase, such as SD cards and HDMI ports.
The claim here is that they could have anticipated that if they weren't driven overly by the aesthetic bragging-rights side of the design team vs the functional side. It's not hard to anticipate everyday reliability causing more blowback than relatively-rare battery-replacement capabilities. They probably had a very good idea of how many replacement batteries were sold, after all. (And for the record: headphone jacks are still there.)
Could it be that miniaturization has reached a local maximum of what current technology can support and we simply can't make devices that are thinner and lighter while preserving battery life and computing power?
Or maybe they got thin enough so other factors now outweigh thinness. Notice how laptop batteries used to last 2 hours and now they go 8h and more.
If you can make a device 1cm thinner and keep the same 2 hours of battery life, worth it. But if a 10mm device lasts 2 hours and a 12mm lasts 6 hours, obviously 12mm is the better choice.
Notice that phones continue to get thinner. Except around the camera because better photos outweigh smaller camera.
Yep I'm sad about this too. Consumers want big screen. Especially when a phone is their primary, often only, computing device
Not really. Jony Ive, chief designer at Apple for most of the iphone era, left in 2019. He and Jobs were the primary pushers behind the "thinner, lighter" drive. Once the chief pushers for "form > function" left, it predictably stagnated, and begun to fall in line with industry standards from other companies.
Apple understands that deeply, everything they do is optimized for delivering that goal.
The practicalities of "how it works" always seemed important to me.
∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]
The people who create the worst designs are designers
∀x ∀y [(P(x) ∧ D(y) ∧ W(y) ∧ C(x, y)) → R(x)]
2. IF x is a Person AND y is a Design AND y is Worst AND x Creates y THEN x is a Designer.
taste without curation for the community, with an eye to what is culturally edifying, is just consumerism
Taste doesn’t matter when slop puts food on the table.
Write the article you’d rather write: how to make money. That’s the main slant here of wanting to have differentiation. “Taste” was a marketing tool by Jobs telling people what they wanted to hear. This is why it’s called people management. You calibrate output based on input. If someone is receptive to being complimented, you give them a compliment while taking their money.
Don’t beat around the bush.
Rough hewn "unfinished" fittings (tables, chairs, cabinets, etc) are the kinds of objects that bounce about the taste spectrum