Taste Is a Lazy Word

Taste is the most overused word in design and one of the least useful. It is what we say when we cannot or will not articulate the actual reasoning behind a decision. "Good taste" almost always means "I know it when I see it," which is another way of saying the practitioner has not built a system around the work and is hoping nobody asks too many questions. This is fine when taste is used informally, the way you might say someone has good taste in restaurants or music. It becomes a problem when taste gets treated as a serious professional qualification. The designer who can only defend their decisions by appealing to taste is not actually defending them. They are gesturing at an unarticulated intuition and asking everyone in the room to trust it. The current narrative around AI makes this worse. The story being told right now, in design publications and on conference stages, is that taste is the human differentiator in the age of AI. The argument runs: machines can produce work, but only humans can decide what is good. Therefore taste is the moat. Therefore designers should double down on taste. This is exactly backwards. Taste, as the field commonly uses the word, is undocumented, unsystematic, and based on intuition. Those are precisely the qualities AI is best at reproducing. Pattern-matching aesthetic preference is one of the most tractable problems in machine learning. A model trained on enough examples of "good design" will eventually produce work that reads as tasteful to most viewers, including most designers. The undefended taste of a designer is the first thing that gets compressed, not the last. What does not compress is a system. A designer's articulated framework for how decisions get made, why they get made that way, what the standards are, and how the framework evolves under pressure. A system can be defended, taught, scaled, and improved. A system can be applied to new categories. A system makes the work legible to other people who have to live with it. A system is the difference between a designer who can lead a team and a designer who can only execute. Designers who lean on the language of taste are vulnerable in ways they do not yet realize. The moat they think they have is shallower than it looks. The designers who are actually durable in the next decade are the ones who can articulate the system underneath the work, in their own words, with reasoning that holds up to scrutiny. This is not an argument that aesthetic intuition does not exist. It does. Some designers genuinely see things faster than others. The argument is that intuition without articulation is not a defensible professional position. It is a hope. The serious work is in turning the intuition into a system, the system into a method, the method into a practice that other people can learn from. Replace the language of taste with the language of systems. Not because taste does not exist, but because the word lets too many designers off the hook. The lazy version is calling it taste and hoping nobody asks for more. The serious version is doing the work of articulation, every project, every decision, until the system is real enough to defend on its own.