#69: Getting personal with taste
....and other things that makes us uniquely human
Dear friends,
Welcome to my 69th post. It’s good to have you here!
I can’t stop thinking about taste and how it works. When I’m interested in something. I tend to fill my head with as much questions about it as I can. It helps me think better and quite frankly, it’s been helpful in synthesizing ideas. This essay is not about answering these questions (It’s never about the answers) but rather, it’s a personal source of reflection.
‘Taste.’
Is taste a skill?
Why is it so tricky to develop?
Is it really subjective? If so what is the point? How do you measure it?
Are we all naturally born with a preconceived notion of one? Or do we develop it as we grow older and gain more experiences?
How strong are our external influences to the taste we come to have as adults?
What about as kids?
In the age of artificial intelligence, what does it mean to develop a personal taste in X?
Does it even matter anymore? Now that algorithms are here, for better or worse, to help us identify what we like and don’t like?
From the songs we listen to, to the films we watch all the way to the conversations we foster, they are all driven by taste. Taste is the invisible thread that connects all of them and builds a lot of our personalities, the good, the bad and of course, the ugly.
What you choose to notice and care about says a lot about you. I always feel like I’m a walking museum of all the things I’ve come to love. It’s almost as if I am the sum of all the things I’ve touched (& have touched me).
It’s a funny thing really, this influence. You can’t explain it most of the time, you certainly can’t make sense of it. Maybe it’s due to a personal history or a far flung association of a memory with a particular object. It’s hard to tell sometimes what draws us to a specific pattern. I certainly can’t be certain of it myself.
What I’ve found to be true on my end is how much (& how little) emotions play into all of this. Feeling good is a great driver but only in the beginning. It is not, however, what sustains a relationship, an extremely personal relationship with the world around us: physical goods, products, companies, nature and even with people—especially with people.
A well-crafted, beautifully edited film trailer can hook me up but if the final product itself falls short minutes into it, it’s over. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind being surprised. Especially with art—subjectively speaking—intentional provocation is rarely a bad thing. But it has to be aligned with certain expectations. This may be a bit of a contrarian viewpoint. It’s not enough for it to feel good, It has to feel right. It has to have a flow, regardless of how much of a rollercoaster experience that is emotionally.
Legendary artists, screenwriters and most types of creatives have learned to use that and turn than insight into a superpower. Creativity works side-by-side with taste. You can make the argument than they are both by-products of one another. Beauty comes from usefulness and essence as well as taste. They tend to separate a great experience from an obvious mediocre one.
To describe this further in application: there is a line from that film, ‘Burnt’ starring Bradley Cooper as this brilliant but troubled, Michelin-star obsessed chef Adam Jones. He was describing what his vision was for his restaurant to his colleague played by Sienna Miller:
‘I don't want my restaurant to be a place where people sit and eat. I want people to sit at that table and be sick with longing.’
My interpretation is that ’sick with longing’ means wanting more than just an out-of-the-box pleasure. It’s a feeling or a sensation so rare, you’d gladly pay for, travel hundreds of miles for, or meet a million other people just to get it. Just to have it again. That kind of feeling.
‘What makes people tick?’
It’s easy to bring out the positive emotions out of a viewer, there’s a lot of proven and measurable tricks for that. By the way, this is only bad if you think persuasion is bad. Just like many things, a lot of this is taken contextually.
To me, what’s harder (and will keep on getting harder and harder with emerging technology) is forming a sense of connection, an ache, an impact, a persistent & deep longing.
The kind that can make you say things like:
‘After this experience of 1,
‘The world looks a lot different.’
‘I feel like a completely different person.’
‘I’ve felt things that I have not before.’
‘I can’t unsee what I’ve just seen.’
or something to that effect. (This is how I feel everything I watch a Denis Villeneuve film, especially Dune and The Arrival.)
Making the right people2 care about what you think they ought to care about— this is the real challenge. If the story you’re trying to tell has been told a thousand times, what makes your version better? More importantly, what makes it different? What senses are you trying to wake up that not many others have? And in all of this, what is the expectation from the viewer?
This is true in art, literature and cinema, as it is in product, design and technology. At least if we are talking strictly about market dominance, cultural relevance and/or commercial success.
Aside from filmmakers, there’s no one better to talk to about taste than designers. When I was in design school, this wasn’t a specific topic that was taught to me, nor at the places I’ve worked at. It’s for a simple reason— taste is not a skill, therefore it isn’t something that can be developed structurally. You can’t ‘framework your way’ building a great taste in something, in anything. It’ll be nothing short of laughable and fake if you attempt to do that.
Any decent designer can tell you that. No, taste can’t be manufactured and packaged artificially.
‘So where does Taste come from?’
Taste comes with life. The richer3 your life is, the better your taste will be. It is, in a lot of ways, an aggravation of everything you’ve ever experienced from the day you were born to the day you started doing things intentionally. As humans who are living and breathing in this natural world, we collect and absorb data for every minute of our lives. Everything—everything—we see and do, touch and taste, hear and feel is data. This is where taste is born and bred and nourished, and oftentimes even discarded or outgrown.
Despite what the algorithms probably would reflect, the blend of everyone’s taste is unique. We may have similarities and overlapping preferences but the giant concoction, the primary cocktail that makes up most of our own personal tastes, that’s one-of-a-kind. Our humanity and individuality is one-of-a-kind.
This is probably why AI feels so incredibly threatening for anyone who is paying attention. For the first time in human history, it feels like the opposite. When machines start to replicate the core of what makes humans, humans, in a way that is extremely lifelike, it is terribly difficult to not see it as anything short of an emotional experience.
Humans.
If all of this is a glimpse of what the future will be, I can’t imagine there to be a shortage of ALL of these types of experiences. But unlike these machines that are on the cusp of being supercomputers, I just don’t have the bandwidth to process of all these just yet. Not at this moment, no.
As a human, I am learning to be okay with that.
Thank you for reading working title,
Nikki
Things I’ve been paying attention to lately:
Humane and the promise of an ambiant computing-themed future
The app store moment for OpenAI? - seems like it.
A raw, unedited note from my private notes:
From 09/13/2023:
‘Everything that you’ve ever enjoyed in your life, everything that made you feel as alive and as human, it was probably because of someone’s writing. Creative writing is not useless, nor will it ever be a zero-sum pursuit. For as long as there are humans, there will be writing, there will be art. Made by humans, for humans, as it should be. Then, now and even more importantly, the future.
Outsourcing creative writing to AI is basically outsourcing our own humanity.’
Can be anything from physical and experiential products, goods & services or a piece of craft and artwork (film, music, book, painting etc)
Your audience, target market, primary customer — the people you made the product for
In experiences not money