TASTE

How we judge the meaning of cultural objects begins innocently enough: merely on one’s own taste. But upon further examination we are in fact delving into a mess of culture, sociology, economic status, and linguistic meaning. Rather than pretending I can contribute originally to this long studied topic, instead, I will examine the history and leading theories on what it is we mean when we discuss the thing we’re referring to when we use words like “taste” and “preference”.

Prelude

Despite all the performance of objectivity, “metrics”, “impact”, and the like, judgments on the value of design by design buyers is usually emotional followed by logical justifications. However, in the absence of persuasive design artifacts from ineffective designers, it is true that most designers especially in UX rely on logical arguments and personal prestige in order to win over audiences. In that scenario, nobody in that room is judging design on taste, but rather they are looking first at evidence - user research etc - and implied business impact. Design mocks are an inconvenient middle stage that’s quickly stepped over between user research and business impact. Even in these situations where taste plays minimal role in design persuasion and decision making however, social signifiers like reliability and prestige of the designer are often unspoken determiners of whether or not the proposal is effective. So even in these cases you could say a certain kind of “taste” is selecting whether or not the individual is capable, since the objects are not being judged. I have seen these situations before: designers who basically do not have a design craft that could persuade on its own merits bamboozle audiences with personal prestige claims, user research, and impact metrics. Unfortunately this works surprisingly well, as engineering-centered audiences are almost supernaturally afraid of “subjective” topics like taste. Perhaps they get flashbacks of art class, have a panic attack, and feel relieved when the designer basically shows numbers instead of mocks. Never mind that they’re quantifying fuzzy information like user feedback, analytics, click-through rates etc., all of which has actually minimal concrete impact on knowing for certain whether or not a design is truly successful. Yet, the bias is so strongly there since this audience has completely trained themselves out of using their own taste at all, that they would prefer basically useless numbers over using their own taste. And the irony is that for such an ill-trained group in terms of perceiving taste, perhaps this is actually a reasonable decision.

However this is not the scenario I want to focus on. That is, the scenario where taste of cultural objects is completely bypassed in favor of pseudo-objective quantities in order to persuade engineering stakeholders. Instead, I want to focus on how exactly taste determines the perceived value of objects directly without a human intermediary arguing on its behalf.

Let’s take a look at the typical design presentation scenario: do viewers really judge the object on its own merits in a vacuum, they themselves alone quietly viewing something alone on a computer monitor or at a museum gallery? No, they are in a room with peers being presented to by a human designer narrating and arguing for it. So there are a lot of confounding variables. Certainly taste plays a role regardless. We are not rendered dumbfounded by the presence of peers and a narrative. But I’d argue that those factors do contribute to how well something is perceived. This makes our topic more difficult to examine: are we really examining taste itself, or are we examining the sociocultural factors of a design presentation? For the sake of this article I want to get out of the way some of the disclaimers about the messy reality of design presentations and all the non-taste factors I mentioned such as perceived credibility, social class, and engineering-friendly quantitative language. Instead, I want to focus on the individual and taste.

The reason I want to do that here is because if I open up the process of taste to a group ritual, which in design it is, then there are so many confounding sociological variables it may not even be taste that we’re discussing at all but group consensus, social status, and many other non-taste factors. By avoiding the group taste test we allow ourselves to focus on taste itself and not other forms of judgment.

Development

I want to take a retrospective at the history of the study of taste beginning with David Hume in Of the Standard of Taste published in 1757 and moving up until the modern day. It is in fact the history of Western philosophy that underpins our ideas around the language of artistic judgment and personal preferences and this is inescapable if we are to work in the English language. I think it is underestimated just how much our native language itself shapes the way we think, since it is so full of meaning.

In Of the Standard of Taste, we have a very strange almost religious-adjacent book written in the middle of the 18th century. It is completely devoid of citations or evidence as I’m assuming is the practice of those days which relied on logical persuasion, and is written like a series of aphorisms. Let’s take a look.

“But though there be naturally a wide difference in point of delicacy between one person and another, nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty. When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused; and the mind is, in a great measure, incapable of pronouncing concerning their merits or defects. The taste cannot perceive the several excellencies of the performance; much less distinguish the particular character of each excellency, and ascertain its quality and degree.”

So here Hume acknowledges the gap in taste that occurs between practitioners and consumers of cultural/artistic products. How could we ever communicate across such a gap?

I also find it interestingly how Hume repeatedly returns to the topic of morality in his treatise on taste, suggesting that moral alignment and taste are in the same realm:

“The case is not the same with moral principles, as with speculative opinions of any kind. These are in continual flux and revolution. The son embraces a different system from the father. Nay, there scarcely is any man, who can boast of great constancy and uniformity in this particular. Whatever speculative errors may be found in the polite writings of any age or country, they detract but little from the value of those compositions. There needs but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions, which then prevailed, and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them. But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever.”

This article is a work in progress.

8.7.2025

Lee Beckwith

Bibliography:

Of the Standard of Taste, David Hume (1757)

Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant (1790)

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Mary Douglas (1966)

Art Worlds, Howard S. Becker (1982)

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Pierre Bourdieu (1984)

Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, Grant McCracken (1988)

Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Kendall L. Walton (1990)

Fashion as Communication, Malcolm Barnard (1996)