Taste, taste, taste
Postcard #44
Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.
Thoughts, tools, and treats
Digitalization, the peak of quantification, is embracing the qualitative par excellence: taste. For real?
Taste I
„Is it discernment? Sensibility? Cultivation? Is it inborn or learned? A marker of distinction or a marker of class?“ the New York Times asks.
Taste II
Taste „has become as much of a tech-world cliché as ‘disruption’ was in the twenty-tens,“ Kyle Chayka argues in the New Yorker, and senses „taste-washing.“
Taste III
Will Manidis is „against“ taste, because he thinks it turns human beings into „a critic of creation rather than a co-creator. A consumer (...) the activity is acquisition. And the acquisition leads nowhere.“
Taste IV
Analog interfaces with their „innate intuitiveness“ continue to be the benchmark of good design, John Gruber believes: „Light switches were easy and obvious. Flip the switch. Thermostats were easy and obvious. Turn the dial until the indicator points to the temperature you want. Light switches and Honeywell thermostats were so simple they seemed like they weren’t ‚interfaces‘ at all, which is why they were such great interfaces. The best interfaces almost literally disappear.“
Taste V
Taste, of course, requires immersion, time, and openness. It needs to be cultivated, as Ted Gioia points out: „I think Wynton Marsalis was right. He said — and this is controversial — but he said, if you take somebody who spent their whole life just eating McDonald’s hamburgers, you could take them to the best Michelin-starred restaurant in the world — they wouldn’t enjoy it because they would not have cultivated their taste to understand that.“
Noteworthy
„It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.“
– Om Malik
A mystery link leading into the unknown
„And I don’t mean that in a small way...“
As always,
Dirk
P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.