Develop Taste Through Awareness

Developing taste starts with awareness: being mindful and noticing the elements you interact with, the experiences you’re part of, and the environments you inhabit. This includes software, physical products, and architecture.

Pay attention to the moments:

• When you use a piece of software and it evokes positive (or negative) emotions.
• When you interact with a product and it helps you achieve your outcome.
• When you walk in a physical space and there’s a clear energy to it.

Once you start noticing, you then need to:

• Reduce it to the fundamentals.
• Reason with why it works.
• Recreate it yourself.

Reducing it to the fundamentals allows you to identify the core principles, which can be transferred and applied to other areas. The ergonomic properties that make a piece of software work well can apply to physical products. And physical products can influence how environments are designed. Drawing from the first principles enables this behavior.

A principle of software design is “separation of concerns,” which focuses on avoiding overlapping functionality between separate areas. This also applies to other areas like industrial design where designated places have specific use-cases.

With an understanding of the principles, you can then reason with the why—what makes the principle work?

• Does it draw on an emotion?
• Is there a cognitive bias at play?
• Does it fit a pre-existing mental model?

Form a definition for what makes it work.

And then take the principle and apply it in your own work. Find a way to integrate it and put it into practice. We learn by doing, and information is readily absorbed when it’s closely interacted with. This is when we really develop our taste—when those understood principles (the knowledge) transfer into the work we do (the skills).

When you interact with the world, pay attention. Every experience is a chance to refine our sense of taste—our innate understanding of how objects interact with one another to inform aesthetically pleasing and meaningful experiences.

Develop your taste through awareness.

This is your differentiator. This is human intuition. This is you.