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Comment by tdrdt | Hacker News Reader

I think Christopher Alexander has a better answer to this question. He states that anything that is designed is good when love was put into it. People can taste this love.

So it's more like: when love was put into it, it tastes good.

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I was wondering if anyone would bring Christopher Alexander up in this thread, because his work has been a long attempt to answer this question. His claims about the objectivity of beauty, order, and so on, are counterintuitive to contemporary assumptions. But he has certainly gone deeply into the question—like a deep sea diver, or like someone drilling for water in a desert.

this is a little trite and definitely isn't universal, let alone well defined (as to what 'love' means in this context) so doesn't really help anyone trying to understand more about what makes good taste (or good design, in your instance) - i think there can be plenty examples of good design and good taste that come from hate, or from indifference; all sorts of emotions and rationales...

It does sound trite when distilled into a one-liner, but Alexander put 60+ years of work into it and wrote his 4-volume masterpiece about it. Nothing trite about that.

I can't recall the exact quote, but I read something a while back that said that hate is essentially a response to something you love being harmed, so great hate still requires great love.

Picasso's Guernica is the poster child for art made from hate, in this case against the Spanish Civil War. But it's equally a painting centered on love for the victims of the war. After all, it's mostly a painting of those victims.

I don't think much good of anything can come from a position of indifference.

It's the background details that bring out the love. A paint-by-numbers movie can stick because of the visceral knowledge that the production team cared about what they were making, even when the story beats are highly formulaic. On a rewatch, it becomes apparent that there's more going on than the bog-standard storyline presented by the leads.

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