Writing

Taste Is Not a Setting

3 min read

Why taste is contextual, dynamic and shaped through selection, creation and consequence.

The easiest way to misunderstand taste is to describe it as a list of preferences.

Minimal layouts. Warm colours. Editorial typography. No gradients. Short sentences.

That list may be useful. It is not taste.

Taste is the moving process that produced the list.

It is the ability to encounter several plausible options and feel that one of them contains more life, more truth or more potential than the others. It is selection under context. It changes with exposure, work, environment, ambition and the person you are becoming.

A static profile can record what you liked. A system that understands taste has to notice how and why your choices move.

Taste lives between references.#

One image rarely explains much.

The useful information appears in the relationship between images: what repeats, what breaks the pattern, what you save despite it contradicting everything else, what you reject even though it matches the visible style.

Two people can save the same chair for completely different reasons. One sees the material. One sees the silhouette. One sees the social world around it. The object is evidence; the judgment is hidden.

This is why taste cannot be reduced to tags.

“Black.” “Brutalist.” “Fashion.” “Clean.”

Tags describe content. Taste describes selection.

Taste is contextual.#

A person may love visual noise in a poster and hate it in a financial dashboard. They may prefer severe typography for their own work and playful typography for a client. They may reject an idea today because the project is too early, then choose the same idea six months later.

A useful taste system must represent scope.

preference
+ context
+ strength
+ evidence
+ time

Without context, personalization becomes caricature.

Taste compounds through action.#

People often talk about taste as if it is a gift you either possess or lack. In practice, taste develops through repeated exposure and consequence.

You choose. You make. You see the result in the world. You notice what survived contact with reality. You return with a more precise eye.

The loop matters:

exposure
→ selection
→ creation
→ consequence
→ reflection
→ changed selection

A folder of references captures exposure. It does not capture the rest.

Meraki is interested in the whole loop.

An approval becomes evidence of what worked. A rejection becomes evidence of a boundary. A correction reveals the distance between the generated option and the intended one. An outcome tells us whether the judgment survived outside the interface.

Over time, the profile should not become larger for the sake of being larger. It should become more discriminating.

A taste profile should be allowed to disagree with itself.#

Contradiction is not always failure.

A person can hold opposing preferences because different projects activate different parts of them. They can change their mind. They can pursue novelty deliberately. They can become bored with their own patterns.

A system that tries to remove every contradiction may remove the person.

The better goal is structured plurality: knowing which preference belongs to which mode, project, audience or moment.

Taste is not the final aesthetic layer.#

Taste affects more than appearance.

It shapes which problems feel worth solving, which tradeoffs are acceptable, which facts deserve emphasis, which jokes land, which opportunities feel alive and which technically correct result should still be discarded.

In AI systems, taste is often treated as decoration added after reasoning. I think it belongs inside judgment.

The model can generate options. The intelligence layer should help decide which option belongs here.

Taste is not a setting you configure once.

It is a living record of attention becoming choice.