Taste Test
Forget frameworks. Taste is about distilling your intention into something that's uniquely valuable.
I love USM furniture. It’s not for everyone. It’s powder coated and chromed steel, made in a limited palette of colors, and it’s configurable. You can turn a shelf into a bedside table. You can combine a storage unit, maybe turn it into a headboard or a room divider. The flexibility makes it sound a bit cheap and Lego-like, but it’s not. It’s very precisely engineered. The powder coating process was standardized in the 1960s, so it’s possible to color match metal panels bought 50 years ago with panels bought today.
I love it. I love the rigidity of the system. The constraints invite you to play with what’s possible. There are all sorts of hacks out there, with people building weird and wonderful living solutions.
Business consultant types would have you believe that USM is a triumph of targeting; of understanding a user base and designing with that persona in mind. They’ll share persuasive data on how my personal preferences and motivations align with thousands of other customers. How USM Haller has built a product with unique appeal to a valuable audience—but they’re wrong.
It doesn’t matter how much compelling data is shown, or how many compelling frameworks are shared. I love USM furniture because…well…I’m not even sure why. I’ve loved it since the first time I saw it. There’s something inherently artistic about it, in the broadest sense, where art is fundamentally about creating a reaction in others.
I’m filled with hope (and some pride) that these fundamentals of art and artistry are making their way into conversations about business. It’s long overdue. Kahneman wrote the definitive work on how emotional response governs our decision-making in Thinking Fast and Slow, but I love the simplicity of Antonio Damasio’s quote:
“We are not thinking machines that feel, we are feeling machines that think”
Taste is the new business buzzword
If you caught Nitin Nohria in the Atlantic, you’ll know what I’m talking about. He makes the case that in a world flooded with AI solutions, taste—the ability to discern what’s most meaningful, resonant, appropriate—is the most crucial human skill. So far so good.
He then goes on to give readers a framework for how to cultivate taste. You should expose yourself to more stimulus, you should curate your own personal collection, and reflect on what’s meaningful to you.
Unfortunately I think this misses the point.
In a world where AI is going to create best practices and recommend shipping solutions that are good, we need to be careful about how we define innately human characteristics like taste. Taste is not some higher plane of analytical understanding you reach through dedicated effort and discipline. It’s not another framework for thinking. It is, at its core, something you feel. It’s not objective, it’s wonderfully subjective.
That’s not to say it can’t be taught. It’s not to say you can’t improve your own taste, but it’s a mistake to implicitly frame taste as some sort of rare, cultivated judgment of what is objectively best. I think people that don’t understand taste think of it like this. They think of it like a shared sensibility; something that with enough dedication to your craft, you can suddenly see. That’s not what taste is.
There is no best. There is only more or less of the intention.
There are millions, probably billions of people who would hate to live with USM furniture, but when Haller joined USM in the 1960s, he didn’t use his taste to identify an audience for his vision. That’s the wrong way round. He didn’t collect, curate, and reflect enough that he could be the objective arbiter of what is high-quality, tasteful modular steel furniture.
Instead, he refined a unique intention that he found somewhere deep inside himself. He felt modularity was important. He felt sustainability was essential. Durability was not to be compromised. We can’t possibly know the myriad influences that led Haller to create something that now sits in the MoMA permanent collection, but we know it was unique to him.
And most importantly that intention connects with certain people. Not everyone. Very deliberately, not everyone. Weird people like me who like metal furniture.
I understand the desire to make it accessible. I know why it’s valuable to turn taste into something you can refine like any other business protocol, but it’s not the same as other business concepts. There isn’t an equivalent of Porter’s Five Forces for taste. Taste can’t be turned into a framework for decision-making. A taste-based two-by-two won’t deliver the kind of value created by people with great taste (my favorite recent example being Jonathan Anderson at Dior).
Developing great taste (and I say this as someone who is still very much on that journey), is about distilling the most essential parts of your judgment and sensibilities. It is fundamentally a journey inside yourself, not a body of knowledge you can accrue. That’s what makes it so difficult and so rare. So how might we start?
The most essential parts of you
There’s an early stage to developing your taste that simply requires exploration. You need to see, feel, sense enough stimulus to start to formulate preference. It’s different for every person—it wasn’t until I was well into my 20s that I started to really notice my preferences for things like shape, color, texture, style. Whereas my 8-year-old seemed to emerge from the womb with a strong sense of what she is and isn’t willing to wear.
Once you’re beyond this stage, once you have preference, once you can articulate it (even to yourself), you can explore the following practice. It’s certainly helped me and many mentors:
Notice with intention
Our brains are built to predict—it’s the most efficient way to move through the world—but it means we sometimes fail to notice what’s right in front of us. A critical step on any journey of refining your taste is to actively take the time to notice aspects of everything that moves you—and perhaps more importantly, what repels you.
You should do this with art—all forms—books, games, movies, music—but perhaps more importantly, you should train yourself to do it with everything else around you. The shape of a particularly pleasing fork in a restaurant, the action of a satisfying door handle. It’s in the everyday objects I’ve found more to love (and more to hate), which has really helped me with my design practice.
Some people keep notebooks, or sketch these observations. I’ve done that from time to time, and find reviewing these notes to be satisfying. But also, who has the time? I think actively noticing is significant enough for most people.
A deeper approach for this practice is to consider how your personal perspective aligns with society. Is everyone frustrated with the way this turnstile works, or is it just me? This can be a really valuable practice for designers working on products with significant scale. It’s like you’re tuning your taste to that of the world.
Make things as inquiry
Last week I shared a great quote from Ira Glass about the gap between your taste and your ability. Ira’s quote is meant to reassure, and it should, everyone feels that gap.
But the gap between your taste and your ability is also an opportunity to better understand the depths of your taste. Why does this prototype fall short of your vision? Or a recent example from my life: What is it about this air-dry clay penguin that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations? (It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and the ideal activity for my 8-year-old.)
For me, writing is a constant source of this inquiry. I have a thought, and I try to express it with words. It so often falls short. But the act of trying, the act of assessing how much it falls short of that thought that elicited an emotional response—well, that’s where the magic happens.
Sharpen through friction
Finally, something that should already be part of any good design practice is friction. Constructive friction.
In your personal practice this can mean many things. It can mean sharing your work with someone you trust, but it could also mean publishing something online.
The important thing is that you practice the act of detaching yourself from your work at this critical moment. Not because the wisdom of the crowd is better than your own taste (it annoys me that sometimes our design processes can lean this way). You should detach so that you can make a judgment call that’s driven by your taste and is not defensive or reactive to criticism.
What does that mean? Well, imagine you write something that’s deliberately funny. You think it’s funny, but you share it with five people who don’t laugh. That doesn't mean it’s not funny. Taste is about knowing when to adjust and when to hold firm. Now, the obvious trap here is that you end up creating for yourself and yourself alone. That’s not good. But recognizing that your creation, your contribution can be wonderfully subjective (and will likely have an audience amongst the 6 billion people on Earth) is an important aspect of refining your taste. You should actively choose when to depart from something you think is wonderful, or when to preserve it in the face of criticism. I think this is the hardest, but also most valuable part of building any discipline around taste. You will absolutely be in the minority at some point. You will be in a room where everyone is telling you that you’re wrong and that you need to change whatever you’ve made. It’s a question of taste, and how you handle that feedback—whether you adjust or persevere. Well, that’s the whole point. So the more you can practice that, the more you can feel your way through that challenge with lower stakes experiences. The better prepared you are for when it really counts.
Taste isn’t hidden knowledge waiting for a framework to make it accessible. It’s not universal and it’s not teachable in a business school debate. It’s innately individual and subjective. It’s the result of practice, and a deeper connection with yourself and your own intention—a refinement of what you believe matters the most.
It’s this that makes it unmistakably human in a world that’s increasingly made more efficient by AI.
I suppose Aristotle hit the nail on the head when he said “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom” but my personal taste leans towards Taylor Swift. I think she put it better when she said I'm the only one of me / Baby, that's the fun of me.
My gift to you
Whilst writing this week’s edition, I had the idea that Wireframe might help refine the individual taste of every reader. You all had great feedback on the links I shared last week, so from this issue forward we’re going to build on that and share cultural references for you to notice with intention. I’m not going to share what I think is good, or what talks to my taste, I’m just going to share a collection of references that could lead to interesting conversations in the paid subscriber chat. As always, please keep the feedback coming.
Notice with intention
Every week we share cultural stimulus to help Wireframe readers refine their taste. You can join the subscriber chat to discuss.
Tyler, The Creator
I find it so inspiring that someone so prolific and creative can be so comfortable with their early work. I often cringe at work I’ve produced earlier in my career, but I love that Tyler’s reaction is “aaah that’s cute”.
[Interview] Ask it anyway | Tyler the Creator
Jonathan Anderson at Dior
I promise I’ll shut up about this next week, but his debut collection was covered in Forbes magazine—which I think talks to the importance of taste for the business world. JW Anderson has turned his taste into something with huge commercial value, his first collection had more than a billion views. I also think the way he seemed to curate every aspect of the launch: The invite with a simple image of an egg. Using the Close Friends feature on Instagram to leak some of the content. The fact he brought priceless artwork together to inspire and contextualize the show. It’s a great example of an organization being structured around a single person’s intention.
[Behind the scenes] Loic Prigent takes us on a tour of the show
The Louvre, Copyists
“Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre” What a fantastic prompt to give 100 contemporary artists. The exhibition of the resulting work will be displayed through early 2026. This raises questions for me. I wonder how each artist felt copying, even when given permission? I suspect they felt fine—perhaps liberated?
[CNN Report] The Louvre Copyists
