Every year since 2011, I've created a playlist with my favourite songs. It's become my personal time capsule, a musical journey through the chapters of my life. When I scroll through these playlists, I'm struck by how dramatically my taste has evolved. Each year tells a story—who my mates were, where I lived, who I was dating. The fascinating part? Despite the vast differences from year to year, I still love all this music. I didn't stop liking anything; instead, my taste expanded, morphed, and grew richer.
This musical evolution mirrors how our tastes change in general. Whether it's tucker, fashion, or design, what we like grows with us, shaped by our experiences, the people we meet, and the places we go. It's a beautiful, messy process that defies easy categorisation.
In this age of AI, where machines are trying to understand and replicate human taste, what does all this subjectivity mean? How do we square the deeply personal nature of taste with AI's attempts to quantify and reproduce it? As someone working in design and AI, I find myself constantly wrestling with these questions.
The Subjectivity of Taste
Honestly, I find it hard to pin down exactly what I gravitate towards. Sometimes I envy people who can confidently say, "I'm into minimalist Scandinavian design" or "I only listen to classic jazz". Me? I'm more of a 'try anything once' kind of person. My curiosity is boundless (sometimes to a fault), and I tend to find something to appreciate in almost everything. Or maybe it's that I can see why different people or groups might be drawn to different things.
This broad appreciation serves me well in many aspects of life, but it gets complicated when it comes to my work in design. In the design world, we try to add some science to the art of aesthetics. We have principles of hierarchy and whitespace that guide us in creating pleasing, understandable designs. So while everyone can have their subjective opinions on taste, there are also some "rules" we're supposed to adhere to.
But even these "rules" aren't universal. During my time at Grab, I encountered a fascinating tension between mainly US design principles and the actual preferences of users in Southeast Asia. What we considered "clean" design often didn't make it feel locally made. It was a constant balancing act, trying to create designs that felt right across different cultural contexts, especially in such a diverse region as Southeast Asia.
This experience reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu's argument that taste isn't purely subjective, nor is it a matter of refined expertise. Instead, it's a reflection of one's social class and cultural capital. Through this lens, our judgments of 'good' or 'bad' taste might actually be reinforcing social hierarchies. Were we, coming from educated backgrounds in the design world, simply imposing our standards on work that might have different cultural contexts or target audiences?
Defining and Judging Taste
Despite my openness to various aesthetics, I am a human and I judge, maybe even so hard as being a "hater". I catch myself cringing at what I perceive as 'bad taste'. This tendency was particularly pronounced during my time as an art director, where my copywriting partner and I would often lament the 'bad taste' we saw in other work.
But what made these examples 'bad taste' in our eyes? We'd see concepts that weren't really concepts at all, just tired ideas rehashed. Or designs that didn't connect with the audience, instead showcasing some creative director's fascination with a random visual trick. It was frustrating because we could see the missed potential, the lack of critical thinking.
Reflecting on these judgments now, I'm reminded of David Hume's argument in "Of the Standard of Taste". Hume suggested that while taste is subjective, some people—those with more experience and refined sensibilities—are better judges of quality. Following this logic, as design professionals, my partner and I might have been justified in our critiques. We had the training, the experience, the "expert" eye to discern good design from bad.
And just when I think I've got a handle on this, I think about "Notes on Camp" by Susan Sontag, where she argues that what we might dismiss as bad taste can actually have its own aesthetic merit. Camp celebrates the exaggerated, the artificial, the "so bad it's good". Suddenly, those designs we cringed at take on a new light. Could their very "badness" be a form of artistic expression?
It's a tension that's hard to resolve. On one hand, there's value in expertise and maintaining standards in our craft. On the other, we risk creating exclusionary practices that dismiss valid expressions from different cultural or social contexts. And then there's the possibility that what we perceive as bad taste might actually be a deliberate aesthetic choice, embracing camp sensibilities.
(I'll admit, there really were some awful concepts out there that should have never been produced. But it's worth examining our knee-jerk reactions and the philosophical assumptions underlying our judgments of taste.)
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Stay tuned for Part 2: Reflecting on My Own Taste, a case study