Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CGMthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who works with a lot of creatives, I've noticed people tend to get really defensive and self-righteous anytime "taste" comes up, on both sides - the haute designer-types vs. the scrappy I-can-do-it types. So I won't be surprised if this post is controversial. But it's insightful.

Having poor taste (or more charitably, having no taste) can be covered up or ignored by the ability to choose from a pre-curated tasteful menu of options. This is what happens when people who "hate shopping" pick a mainstream clothing brand and stick with it. Or pick a car (most of them). Or a frying pan. I've never seen an offensively ugly frying pan. You could pick one out blindfolded and end up OK 100% of the time.

But when you put a tool like generative AI into this person's hands, they are exposed. The palette of possibilities is open. The curation is on you. And if someone with taste isn't in the mix, it will ultimately become apparent when you share your creation with the world.

Like it or not, tastes change. Both the personal and society's tastes.

If you look back through the past, you can see some horrid design choices. Thus, some designs we think as awesome right now, will be seen as horrid to our descendants.

So if that's true, what if taste is social? And if it's social, then... well, all people have is peer pressure taste.

And your words show the truth in this, to a degree. Pre-curated options, to ensure "good taste" in choice. And how style conveys social status in some capacity, I don't mean "this style means success" but "this style means you have good taste".

Hair styles can be described as "taste", just as a taste in clothing. Yet hair styles suddenly become "ugly" where a decade before they were "tasteful".

Even beauty changes. One century it's skin and bones, the next more corpulent. Sometimes it's muscular, other times slim.

It's all peer pressure, all social status.

Some tastes change but not _all_ tastes change. This is a common misconception in conversations about taste: “some of it is subjective therefore it must all be 100% subjective and meaningless”. Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements. Universal truths, which are characterized as subjective only by those who cannot see it.

Elements of taste are subjective. Not all of it. You recognize this yourself in your own area of skill. Everyone has one area where suddenly they agree not every opinion has equal merit, and can articulate why.

But move out of that subject and into one of their blind spots, and we’re right back to “that’s just taste, taste is subjective, taste changes over time.”

Subjectivity is the refuge of the tasteless, who can afford to let others do our thinking for us. GP was right on point in that regard.

> Yet when this comes round to something you’re good at (music, painting, literature, cooking, sport, …) you immediately recognize that there are in fact timeless elements

The gap between practitioners and bystanders is wide.

There was a "AI art or human art" quiz posted on HN [0]. I got > 90% right while the median score was 60%. I thought I was good at telling AI-generated content and was proud of myself.

Last week I listened to music on a random channel Youtube pushed to me for hours without realizing they're all AI-generated.

In turns out it's not that I have a human's soul or something. It's just that I practiced digital painting before but not music production.

[0]: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-ar...

Isn't that just a lot of words to say "my taste is objective / rooted in reason, other people's tastes are a crapshoot"?

Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?

Sure, there are things we do in a particular way because of manufacturability or utility considerations, and that stays pretty stable in the long haul. We put windows in homes in specific places and make them rectangular. But that's not taste, that's practicality. Everything else changes dramatically from one decade to another.

> Can you prescribe some specific test to tell objective design aesthetics from the "groupthink" ones? If not, then what are you saying, other than "I know when I see it, but not everyone does"?

When you develop a good eye for clothing your sense of taste will be detached from fashion trends. Whether you like oversize pieces or not, you can tell whether the fit is good because fit is a matter of crafstmanship. You can tell from the color scheme what was the artistic attempt and whether the attempt was reached. You can tell the quality of the fabrics. You can tell the historical references a piece is inspired by and whether those references are coherent.

You develop a taste for cocktails and wines and you can try a cocktail that you don't personally prefer, say a Negroni. But you can tell whether the acidity and sweetness levels go well with the ingredients of choice, whether the aromatics are high quality, whether the glass accompanies the drink and if the drink was served at the correct temperature.

If you know about cuisine and someone executes a dish based on a specific style, you can immediately tell of the chef knew about the underlying theory behind those styles and how well they were executed. And they decided to purposefully make a break from a style, you can tell if that made for an impactful quality result or if they should have stuck to the original.

The short answer to your question is "no". The long answer is "read Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance".

This thread also makes me think of Susan Sontag’s essay On Style.

When you spend a lifetime learning design you learn the difference between taste and fashion. Taste is the ability to make solid choices coherently within a system being it fashionable or not.

Fashion is just the latest system that is popular.

Tasteful people can design good things regardless of the fashionable era. Great ones can create new fashionable eras.

More examples: look up Dieter Rams (a person). Ran into the name a while back, and man- he made a record player 50yrs+ ago and it was never meant to be in fashion. It sure would still fit in as "simple device that does X" in the 2020's.

I really don't think that's a good example. That's someone who designers hold in high esteem. Most people today would not buy products with these aesthetics.

Granted, I does hold up better than most, but I don't think it's an example of some immutable, objective principles of fashion.

Bro. You know the iPhone is almost entirely inspired by dieter right?

Like you statement could not be more absurdly wrong to a laughable degree.

I don't disagree. Taste is dynamic. One distinction I'm making is that there are tastemakers and tastetakers. And they are not the same.

The dynamism can come in different ways as well. For example, the tastemaker can change their mind. Or, gen pop can change who they look up to as arbiters of taste.

No. Tastes are subjective; beauty is objective. This is what permits us to say whether someone has good or bad taste. If it were purely subjective, then it would be impossible to make these claims. They would be nothing more than expressions of power, whether by the majority or some authority.

Fads and fashions occur, sure, but they aren't always aligned with good taste. And you can have varieties of beauty (why can't two different styles both be beautiful in two different ways?). I also wouldn't exaggerate the divergence. Some of what you've written is cliche rather than history.

Unity, the true, the good, and the beautiful are but three different perspectives on being and a matter of objective reality. The discernment or subjective condition of the tastes of a person have to do with how one receives reality rather than reality itself. Reality is, after all, received according to the mode of the receiver.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", though I agree some forms of beauty are relatively universal

I had taste before it was cool!

> It's all peer pressure, all social status.

You nailed it here. having 'taste' is a completely subjective concept driven mostly by the 'market-makers' of whatever industry. Your 'taste' is determined by the judgment of others.

There seems to be an element of familiarity too. What was considered 'cool' when one is a teenager becomes an anchor of sorts. Even if society moves on, there will be a cohort who holds on to the era which made the deepest impression on them.

Horrid is just what dramatic people say. Old styles were and are still great. You have to see things for what they were to really understand them. Anything with a good amount of thought put into it is great no matter the time or place. This is why fashions are cyclical: it was always a good idea just one that became too familiar at one point and had to be forgotten and rediscovered. A sort of wanderlust situation.

Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer.

The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments.

On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it.

Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)

Yea coherent systems are satisfying.

Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.

I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.

First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT.

But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness"

So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.

I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences.

But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places:

1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design.

2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance:

  - I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once
  - gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision
  - sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are
  - visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it
  - although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all

I'm interested in HCI broadly— both for users like me and users unlike me. But I don't want to put a ton of energy into things that feel inordinately difficult or basically meaningless to me, either.

You can't be unaware of the existence of the field of accessibility in design? It's literally one of the trendiest things in design, probably trendy enough for you to specialize in it entirely if you wanted to.

The proposition for me is whether to take a class or two on this in the course of pursuing a graduate degree in CS. I'm not considering a career in HCI research.

> It's literally one of the trendiest things in design

Ask a person with low vision about how the rollout of "accessible buses" in Chicago affected their transit experience. I'll give you a hint: it made things worse and more difficult. My sister, who is blind, complains about it all the time. When a friend of hers, who is also blind, called in to say that she couldn't read the stops on the displays in the new "accessible buses", the response (after months of silence) was "we asked Chicago Lighthouse how to design the display, and they said standards called for a bold font and contrasting colors, so we're compliant". In fact the display has a much smaller font than the old LED displays. The colors are bright yellow and bright blue, which are "contrasting colors" but have very little luminance contrast, and they're overall harder to distinguish despite the bold font. Why were these colors actually chosen? It has nothing to do with contrast or accessibility— it's because they're the brand colors of the Chicago Transit Authority. And when actual blind people call them to tell them this doesn't in fact work for them, their answer is that they don't give a shit and that they're not interested in changing anything. (Changes would be physically trivial; the new displays are big-ass LCD TVs.)

This is the norm for accessibility initiatives in the real world, because disabled people are rarely directly involved in the design of anything.

If you've lived your whole life in a world in which accessibility concerns are purely theoretical and/or external to you, I suppose it's easy to have faith in "trends". But nobody who has actually navigated the world with disabilities does. Frankly, the only circumstances in which I'd be confident that an HCI class would not be primarily grounded in the primacy of the visual and the assumption of normal vision is (a) if I've reviewed the curriculum of a specific course and the curriculum indicates otherwise or (b) the course is taught by a blind person. Even so, I'm on the fence— maybe I still want to take such a course.

I'm in the early stages of planning to go back to school here, thinking out loud about whether HCI is a corner of computer science worth visiting for me and sharing that question as part of a perspective on "design" and how I relate to it. I don't need help remembering that accessibility research exists, thank you so very much.

It could be that the designers have to contend with greater forces: marketing, management, available developer time, politics, sprints etc.

It could also be that their work is dictated, so they don't get to explore and research.

It could also be that they are too removed from the users to understand them.

If it was designed, it was designed by a designer. That that designer also happened to play other roles, or that it's a CLI and not a GUI is immaterial. You're clearly confused about what designers do and who they are.

If I deliver a letter to a friend's house, that doesn't make me a mailman. But even setting that aside, I could have simply written "not a designer by training" or "not a designer by trade" or "not a professional designer". Boring.

The problem is there is a mindfuck dynamic the arena of taste brings. Popular taste can overwhelm all other taste. A society may not even know they’ve lost taste for a significant amount of time.

I haven't read the article, so just speaking generally...

(and not meaning to contradict you, just thinking aloud)

I think there's some overlap between "taste" and "thinking for yourself" — though they are not the same thing.

Lots of people don't want to think for themselves in every teeny aspect of life, so choosing from a menu of "good enough" options is reasonable. It doesn't mean they lack taste, just that they lack the energy/interest/etc in that moment for that activity.

Another aspect: plenty of people will know whether they like something when they see it, but they won't be able to describe what they want beforehand. So, they have taste (ability to choose a good one), but not an ability to enunciate it, or conjure it out of thin air.

Also, the "taste" terminology is often intertwined with "style", and I think that's unnecessarily limiting. An "engineer's taste" might help them decide between gadgets and gizmos, based on their merits, even if they're both ugly.

To your last example, I think modern Lodge cast iron frying pans are mediocre. Not because of ugliness/prettiness, but because the sharp ridge/seam on the handle from the casting process is not ground down. It makes it uncomfortable to hold. Also, the cooking surface is left rough. Compare it to an old Griswold — miles apart, according to my tastes. They're both handsome enough to look at, though.

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