Taste for Makers

| "...Copernicus'
aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential
motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."- Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution"All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed
fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked
beautiful would fly the same way."- Ben Rich, Skunk Works"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this
world for ugly mathematics."- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology |

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches
at MIT. His field is hot now and
every year he is inundated by applications from
would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart,"
he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind
of taste."

Taste. You don't hear that word much now.
And yet we still need the underlying
concept, whatever we call it. What my friend meant was
that he wanted students who were not just good technicians,
but who could use their technical knowledge to
design beautiful things.

Mathematicians call good work "beautiful,"
and so, either now or in the past, have
scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers,
writers, and painters.
Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is
there some overlap in what they meant? If there
is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries
about beauty to help us in another?

For those of us who design things, these are not just
theoretical questions. If there is such a thing as
beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need
good taste to make good things.
Instead of
treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered
about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy
abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question:
how do you make good stuff?

If you mention taste nowadays, a lot of people will tell
you that "taste is subjective."
They believe this because it really feels that
way to them. When they like something, they have no idea
why. It could be because it's beautiful, or because their
mother had one, or because they saw a movie star with one
in a magazine, or because they know it's expensive.
Their thoughts are a tangle of unexamined impulses.

Most of us are encouraged, as children, to leave this tangle
unexamined. If you make fun of your little brother for
coloring people green in his coloring book, your
mother is likely to tell you something like "you like to
do it your way and he likes to do it his way."

Your mother at this point is not trying to teach you
important truths about aesthetics. She's trying to get
the two of you to stop bickering.

Like many of the half-truths adults tell us, this one
contradicts other things they tell us. After dinning
into you that taste is merely a matter of personal preference,
they take you to the museum and tell you that you should
pay attention because Leonardo is a great artist.

What goes through the kid's head at this point? What does
he think "great artist" means? After having been
told for years that everyone just likes to do
things their own way, he is
unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great
artist is someone whose work is better than the others'.
A far more likely theory, in his Ptolemaic model of
the universe, is that a great artist is something that's
good for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book.

Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way
to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it's not true.
You feel this when you start to design things.

Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do better.
Football players
like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's
a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at
your job. But if
your job is to design things, and there is no such thing
as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.
If taste is just personal preference, then everyone's is
already perfect: you like whatever you like, and that's it.

As in any job, as you continue to design things, you'll get
better at it. Your tastes will change. And, like anyone
who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting
better. If so,
your old tastes were
not merely different, but worse. Poof goes the axiom that
taste can't be wrong.

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper
you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows.
But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself,
that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you
How has
your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what
caused you to make them? What have other people learned about
design?

Once you start to examine the question, it's surprising how
much different fields' ideas of beauty have in common. The same
principles of good design crop up again and again.

Good design is simple. You hear this from math to
painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be
a better one. Where axioms are concerned, especially,
less is more. It means much the same thing in programming.
For architects and designers it means that beauty should
depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements
rather than a profusion of superficial ornament. (Ornament
is not in itself bad, only when it's camouflage on insipid
form.) Similarly, in painting, a
still life of a few carefully observed and solidly
modelled objects will tend to be more interesting than a
stretch of flashy
but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, a lace collar.
In writing it means: say what you mean
and say it briefly.

It seems strange to have to emphasize simplicity.
You'd think simple would be the default. Ornate
is more work. But something seems to come over people
when they try to be creative. Beginning writers adopt
a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way
they speak. Designers trying to be artistic resort to
swooshes and curlicues. Painters discover that they're expressionists.
It's all evasion.
Underneath
the long words or the "expressive" brush strokes, there
is not much going on, and that's frightening.

When you're
forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem.
When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver
substance.

Good design is timeless.
In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake.
So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no permanent
place for ugly mathematics? He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did:
if something is ugly, it can't be the best solution. There
must be a better one, and eventually
someone will discover it.

Aiming at timelessness is a way to make
yourself find the best answer:
if you can imagine someone surpassing you, you should do it yourself.
Some of the greatest masters did this so well that they
left little room for those who came after.
Every engraver since Durer has had to live in his shadow.

Aiming at timelessness is also a way to evade
the grip of fashion. Fashions almost by definition
change with time, so if you can make something that
will still look good far into the future, then its

Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will
appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to
try to appeal to past generations. It's hard to guess what
the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be
like the past in caring nothing for present fashions.
So if you can make something that appeals to people today
and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good
chance it will appeal to people in 2500.

Good design solves the right problem. The typical
stove has four burners arranged in a square, and a dial
to control each. How do you arrange the dials? The
simplest answer is to put them in a row. But this is a
simple answer to the wrong question.
The dials are for humans to use, and if you put them in a row,
the unlucky human will have to stop and think each time
about which dial matches which burner. Better to arrange the dials
in a square like the burners.

[...]

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