We keep saying taste is the last human advantage, but we’ve built a world (and now tools) that make it almost impossible to develop, and we’re responding by de-risking even further
Most designers and creatives seem to agree that taste and, with that, being able to not only judge what’s good but spot the potential, the spark that might make the difference, is the thing that truly matters and will continue to matter when creating in the age of AI.
But, and it’s a big but, I believe taste in its purest form is fighting the death rattle right now.
I believe that even the most tasteful people you know aren’t taking enough risks when it comes to developing their palate, and I believe that we, as a society, have forgotten what made things tasteful in the first place.
Why it’s important we address this now.
There’s a consensus across product leaders, and that is that design is becoming more about curation than creation. I heard it over and over again this conference season. And what sounds like just another step in technological advancement, to me, is scary as fuck.
Curation is a cop-out.
Because it implies creating less and curating better. And we all know most curation is no longer done by individuals or teams; it’s done in close collaboration with artificial intelligence, even driven by AI in many places already.
This, my friends, is where I’d like to see myself out.
But I won’t.
I won’t, because I love to see the seasons change, lose control of my garden, grow a whole-ass human being in my body, and push myself to the limits of what’s possible to birth it.
In short, I love being human and experiencing natural, uncontrollable, uncuratable things. I truly believe it’s why we’re all here. And I also truly believe no one asked for what we’re currently getting: carefully controlled narratives, a sea of just the same, a feeling that something’s kind of off.
Let me explain.
The bubble is warm and cozy, and it’s scary outside of it.
We live in a bubble. Tech companies spend billions on curating our experience in such a way that we never have to be exposed to something we might not like, might not be interested in, or that might make us feel something uncomfortable. What sounds like utopia on paper is probably the start of most of our problems today: political extremism, the loneliness epidemic, fast fashion, to name a few. And yes, a rapid decline in good judgment as well. The bubble narrows taste.
I don’t remember the last time I discovered new music through a drunken conversation with a stranger or by passing by a dimly lit pub and wondering what melody they were playing. These days, pubs play the same music — most professionally curated to please the widest possible taste palette — and strangers rarely discuss niche interests anymore. Too busy are we discussing the latest political shitshow, and honestly, too afraid are we to risk saying anything too far from the ordinary becasue what if that bursts the bubble? It’s scary out there, alone.
Colin Wilson wrote in his book, The Outsider, in 1956, about what it meant to live life outside of the known societal norms throughout human history. (Oh, do I wish someone would continue his musings with a look at how the internet, social media, algorithms, and finally, AI have influenced this over the last 3 decades or so.) To give you the tl;dr: Innovation, artistic developments, and yes, also technology, have throughout human history been heavily enabled by going beyond customs and pushing the boundaries of ‘common sense’. It’s no coincidence that the most successful people I know are also the most curious.
What does this have to do with taste, though?
While curiosity may kill the cat, it may also lead it to a better life altogether. It’s that risk exactly that makes “better” possible.
But I’d argue we’re at our lowest ever when it comes to taking risks.
I’ve been in design leadership roles for almost a decade now, and whenever design principles are discussed, something like ‘familiar’ comes up.
We want users to recognize the product patterns to make things simpler. At first thought, this is a great principle, as, of course, simplicity is an important pillar of user experience. But, and here I’m likely pissing off a few of you, we have simply made things too simple. We’ve started going the easy path to a point that judging what’s good and what’s not has become difficult. Why? Because the risk of unfamiliarity is a pillar of good. Only something different can unlock a possibly even better solution than the one we currently consider ‘best practice’.
What started with excessive competitor benchmarking has led to everything looking kind of the same. Even bold choices became just that: a choice and not a fundamental part of the product experience. And now, with AI unravelling design processes everywhere and building being cheaper than ever, instead of slowing down and focusing on what the freed-up time can buy us in terms of risks, we de-risked even more. We ship more of the same.
LLMs have been doing so well because we’ve been building the same 2 websites and apps for at least 2 decades. It doesn’t really take thousands on eager tech workers to do that.
Design leaders and creatives are shouting from the rooftops about taste, and yes, I myself have recently given a talk about design judgement, but we haven’t addressed the true difficulty here: how do you develop taste in the first place? How do you know if something is worth exploring, developing, fighting for (because side note: in the end, every design decision has to be defended for cost)?
Can you know, when it’s so hard to break out of what’s been chosen, carefully curated for you?
Burn the haystack, find the needle.
I feel like a magician
But the trick’s on me
To find a needle in a haystack
Well, it’s plenty easy
You just burn down the haystack
And then you’ll find what you need
There ain’t no obstacles that are stronger than greed
— Jack White, All alone again, 2026
The following is the core of this piece. I’ve divided it into two distinct sections: how to develop taste and how to influence people. Note that these are just some things that I do. There are zillions more.
How to develop taste
Embrace friction.
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: you can’t develop taste by consuming more of what you already “like”. Taste is a muscle, and muscles only grow under resistance.
So go looking for friction. Once a week or so, engage with something you’d never pick. Not hate-watching or doom-scrolling. Pay attention to it. Spotify’s own researchers found that when people’s listening got more diverse, it happened because they moved away from the algorithm.
The same goes for designing better stuff: Tony Fadell, who famously led design for the iPod and iPhone, kept telling his teams to lean into pain. And while he meant it in regard to finding users’ greatest pain points, there’s a strong message about friction in there too: don’t keep building the easy stuff. Solve the hard problems. Even if (or especially because), at first, you don’t understand them.
Study what you dislike until you can explain it.
“I don’t like it” isn’t taste; it’s a reflex. Taste starts when you can say why. And sometimes, once you can say why, you change your mind. Or not. But at least you will have understood how you judge. Reflex and intuition are great. But for those of us in creative roles, understanding why we respond a certain way is key to judging somewhat subjective output.
Find the source.
Everything in your feed is a copy of a copy of a copy. Trace things back. Who did it first? What were they reacting against? I believe, taste is knowing where something came from. Hence why I read books from the 50s. Once you go back to the source, arguments become even stronger, and you can draw your own connections to the present day and age. Your opiions suddenly feel like your own. Not like someone/everyone else’s. You start to spot patterns and trends before they are plastered everywhere around you. It feels like its own kind of intelligence.
Create for fucks sake.
Curation without making is just shopping. Make things, even if they’re shit, even if it’s frustrating. If design really is becoming curation, the people with the best eye will be the ones who spent years making mediocre stuff and feeling and understanding the gap between what they made and what they wanted. Which raises a question nobody at those conferences wanted to touch: if juniors only ever curate AI output, where does the next generation’s taste come from?
Don’t shy away.
Let humans be your input. Not online. IRL. The old guy selling you stuff at a flea market. The bookshop staff pick. The weird neighbor who works a job you’ve never heard of. Strangers and loose acquaintances are where the new stuff comes from, because they live outside your bubble by definition. Embrace them. Talk to them. Discuss with them, and disagree with them if you have to.
I recently went for a walk with a good friend. We’re on almost opposite sides of the political spectrum and clearly disagreed with each other on many things. We’ve lived very different lives. And yet, we had a wonderfully engaging conversation that didn’t make us block each other and taught both of us a thing or two — without fundamentally changing our minds. The discourse, human to human, that is where taste forms.
And write it down.
Keep a taste journal: what moved you, what didn’t, why. Because articulated taste is defensible taste.
How to influence people
Every design decision gets defended for cost eventually, and “it just feels right” has never once survived a roadmap review. The best design leaders I have worked with can frame their judgment so well, a nod is almost inevitable. Choosing how to tell the story is where taste starts.
Translate taste into consequences.
Nobody cares that it’s beautiful. They care what happens if it works. Name the bet: what will people feel, remember, tell a friend about? So you need to show the risky version next to the safe one. This is the gift of cheap building.Use the freed-up time to prototype the strange option alongside the obvious one. Prototypes are great at just that: illustrating something that helps you tell a story.
People can’t fall in love with an argument, but they can fall in love with a thing they can touch.
Anchor it in who you are.
Bold choices that grow out of a brand’s story land. Bold choices made to look bold don’t. The same goes for you: framing your input in such a way that it’s clear why it grew from you will make your message stronger.
For example, I have spent most of my career yapping about how best practice is outdated as soon as it becomes best practice. Naturally, when digging into a recent conversation design project, I made the case to not design our interface like the typical friendly, humanized agent but instead to make it to the point and not emulate human conversation at all. It was easy for me to argue this as it’s closely tied to what I stand for.
Spend credibility like money.
Earn it, then spend it on one real fight a quarter. Judging which fights are worth fighting is also an important part of your taste profile. You might personally feel strongly about a certain choice, but it may not matter to users or not be worth disagreeing with leadership over. Not fighting it is also a way to trust your own taste: when I decide not to take a fight, the project usually lands on my desk again sooner or later, and I get to fix it without struggle.
This last one is specifically for leaders:
Be wrong in public.
Teams copy their leaders’ appetite for risk. If the director only ships safe, everyone ships safe. My talks are well-liked because I always bring a bunch of mistakes. I talk about what didn’t work and where I messed up. And I encourage people to be unafraid to do the same.
So burn your haystack.
Taste isn’t dying because AI got good. It’s dying because we stopped feeding it. We let the feed (pun intended) do the tasting for us, and now we’re surprised everything tastes the same, duh.
The curation crowd isn’t wrong that the job is changing. But you can’t curate with an eye you never trained, and you can’t train an eye inside a bubble built to keep you comfortable. If the future of design really is choosing, then the most important work we’ll ever do happens long before we sit down to choose: in the record shop, on the walk with the friend who votes differently, in the shitty first draft, in the paperback from 1956 that no one recommended to you.
That’s the risk I’m asking you to take. Not a rebrand. Not a moonshot. Something smaller and much harder: get lost on purpose. Love something before an algorithm tells you you might. Be wrong out loud, in front of your team.
Jack White’s right. You don’t find the needle by searching harder. You burn the haystack.
I can’t promise any of this will make your product better next quarter. I can promise it will make you harder to replace. Because the one thing no model can curate for you is the thing you went out and found yourself.
We got 99 problems. Let’s make sure taste isn’t one of them.
Nicole is a Content Designer turned Design Director based in Stockholm, Sweden. She potters, writes poetry, and raises little girls in a house by a meadow. You can follow her writing here or get it directly to your inbox via her publication, eggwoman. Nicole is on LinkedIn. Find her portfolio at nicoletells.com.
The taste paradox: why the skill everyone says matters is the one we’ve stopped building was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
