Taste

History, in general, works like a pendulum. Periods of tension alternate with periods of release. The same applies to art and music: the grid, order, geometry against mannerism, baroque, expressionism, grunge… What has changed especially in recent decades is the speed at which it happens: the cycles have shortened so much that the idea of a dominant movement has dissolved. Minimalism and maximalism coexist. Several schools arrive at once in different regions of the same sector. Tension and release have stopped taking turns and started overlapping.

Design has not been alien to this movement. On one hand, the rationalist tradition: the Swiss of the fifties, Müller-Brockmann's grid, the Ulm school, Rams' ten principles. The right decision derives from the problem, and the craft consists of applying solid criteria with discipline. On the other, the expressive tradition: Carson's broken typography, Paula Scher's authored posters, Sagmeister's uninhibited gesture. Design as the trace of someone who has decided to look at the world in a specific way.

These two territories coexisted for decades, gaining and ceding ground depending on the era. But over the last twenty years, within digital product, the expressive territory withdrew. With corporatization, design systems, shared processes, teams of fifty people working on the same interface, that pole diluted. It didn't disappear, it became invisible. The organization's mark remained; the specific designer's hand was erased. Today it's very difficult to say who designed the app you use every day.

Now, with AI touching precisely the industrialized part, that erased pole reappears in the discourse. We're talking again about taste, curiosity, intuition. About art. As if twenty years of industrialization had been a parenthesis and now we could pick up what we left behind. The pendulum shifting place.

That's the kind reading. And it's partly true. But there's another, which is that maybe we're not recovering that pole because we want to. We're recovering it because we feel we're being pushed out of the other one.

Back to "taste"

For weeks I've been seeing the same idea circulate: AI can automate many things, but it can't have taste. It can't be curious. It can't have intuition. The designer's real differentiator, now that the tools are getting democratized, is taste.

It's a seductive idea and, in good part, a true one. There are layers of the craft that don't reduce to heuristics, metrics or systems. But there's something contradictory in how this discourse is being articulated. The same people now claiming taste and judgment as our differentiating value are the ones who've spent years trying the opposite.

What we did in recent years

The history of digital product design this century looks like a long campaign of objectivization. User research, A/B tests, Nielsen's heuristics, Norman's principles, metrics, OKRs, design ops, systems with tokens. Each new layer of process was an answer to the same question: how do we get design to stop being a matter of opinion?

Much of the objectivization came imposed from outside: stakeholders demanding reasons, corporate OKRs that needed measurable translations, the financial logic of SaaS, the rise of digital product inside companies that measured themselves by growth. Designers embraced it and adopted it as adaptation to an environment that was changing faster than we were. It was both a guild move and a structural one.

The movement had good reasons. We wanted to make better products based on what people actually did, and not on what someone with good taste thought they should do. We wanted rigor, budget, a seat at the table. We wanted design to stop being treated as a whim.

But there was another reason, less confessed, that was also there. Objectivization was a piece of armor. When a stakeholder said "I don't like this", we could respond with data. The A/B test converts 12% more. Fitts's heuristic says that button is misplaced. Each metric was a shield against "I don't like it", which was the comment that hurt the most because it was the hardest to rebut. The objective armor was also an emotional armor.

The opposite movement

AI shows up and starts doing exactly that layer with surprising competence. Heuristics, metrics, systems, principles. What took us fifteen years to turn into a rigorous discipline can now be executed by a tool in seconds.

And then, almost reflexively, we've started making the opposite move. If the objective is no longer ours, we'll defend the subjective. If the tool can apply Nielsen, what matters now is taste. What for fifteen years we were eliminating from the conversation.

I'm not saying this with contempt. The move has its share of truth: there's a tacit knowledge, in Polanyi's sense, that doesn't reduce to rules. But what's uncomfortable is seeing how reactive the turn is. Five years ago, a designer who justified a decision by saying "because I have taste" was almost a meme. Today it's the most shared quote in the sector's blogs. Design hasn't changed. What has changed is what we can contribute. And it's not bad at all, it's natural, we've all dreamed of leaving our personal mark on our work. And when I say all, I don't mean only designers.

The stakeholders' mirror

What we now claim as our professional value is exactly something that has surely made you uncomfortable at some point: subjectivity.

When a client said "I don't like the green", when a CEO insisted on moving a button because "it feels off"… we marked it as subjective. Their judgment was treated as a matter of opinion, ours as professional. The line was clear. Now it has shifted, and we've ended up on the opposite side.

The distinction is probably true. A designer with fifteen years looking at interfaces has trained their eye in a way that a finance-minded CEO has not. But it's also convenient. Especially when it comes signed by the same people who five years ago appealed to metrics to settle exactly this kind of discussion.

Quicksand

Here the material problem appears. Defending a decision by taste is much harder than defending it with an A/B test. Conversation doesn't accommodate intangibles well. If I say "this feels right" against someone who says "this converts 12% more", it's not that I'm right or wrong. It's that the system is set up to process the second and not the first.

We're heading into a professional era that's more intellectually interesting and more economically fragile. The subjective opens a more personal, more artistic terrain. But it also brings us to the point where no one can quite explain why.

This is going to separate two kinds of designers. The ones who learn to operate in the subjective with authority, because they have the references, the trajectory, a recognizable voice… And the ones who can't defend the subjective without that authority.

The two territories, again

What awaits us isn't exactly a return. It's recovering a pole we had learned to hide, but without losing what we've learned.

The expressive designer of decades ago operated in a world where no one asked them to defend the design of a dashboard in terms of "taste". The one coming now will have to reclaim intuition without dismissing the metric, because the metric isn't going anywhere. They'll have to step into the expressive territory without abandoning the rationalist one. It will be a balance, and probably also where the real opportunity lies.

The observation is that the current discourse on taste and intuition, even if true, is also reactive. The recovery of the expressive pole isn't a deliberated decision. It's the reflex response to a change we didn't see coming.

The question is more practical. How do you build authority in something that doesn't admit verification? How do you hold a judgment in a room where the judgment across the table carries as much weight as yours? Maybe the answer has to do with having broad cultural and humanistic knowledge.

But even so, the hardest question of all remains: what does it mean to have taste?

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