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It’s an important question! I’ve found it helpful to recognize the essential fuzziness of taste—means that “communicate” and “teach” are probably inappropriately precise. But cognitive apprenticeship seems one reliable avenue to “develop” or “influence” stylistic lenses.

4:51 PM · Jul 12, 2020TweetDeck

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@andy_matuschak

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@sashadem

e.g. at Apple, the primary way I absorbed taste (both in engineering and design!) was in high-bandwidth conversation with more experienced people about my work. Formal crit was an important venue, but informal sessions were also crucial: debating plans, discussing problems, etc

Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jul 12, 2020

Legitimate peripheral participation was also key. Especially as a total design noob, it was so valuable to simply be in a room with people like

@imranchaudhri

—not necessarily contributing to a design but merely trying to interpret what he was saying into something implementable.

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and

This is very much the practice at an art school or music conservatory (where I taught for 12 years): you learn at the elbow of practitioners, perform with peers, test variations and innovations even while the ethos is conserving traditions and the foundations of taste.

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Andy Matuschak

@andy_matuschak

Jul 12, 2020

It’s probably not that you’re just not doing it well! I suspect many of the ideas you want to convey are essentially nebulous and simply can’t be formalized in that way. Case studies, storytelling, “medical mysteries,” etc are useful artifacts in this domain, vs “frameworks"

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and

This is probably obvious, but more “artistic” fields give a lot more weight to this. Art, music and creative writing all seem to devote a lot more time to learning/teaching this. Encouraged to talk about and exercises to strengthen intuition, vision, voice.