Chapter 04 · The Research
Sources,
Influences,
Arguments.
The literature this essay stands on — from Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790 to the taste-economy essays of 2025–2026. Grouped and annotated so you know why each is here.
Part I · Primary Anchors
The small handful of sources the essay leans on directly. If you read only a few things in this list, read these.
01
Anu Atluru — Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley CANONICAL
Working Theorys, Sept 2024. "In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste." The essay that named the shift. Foundational for the Taste Economy framing.
02
Steve Jobs (1995) · Bill Gates on Jobs ANCHOR
Jobs accused Microsoft of having "absolutely no taste" — meaning not aesthetics but original ideas and cultural depth. Gates: "I'd give a lot to have Steve's taste. I'd see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that is hard for me to explain." The anchor for the Conviction chapter.
03
Noam Tractinsky & Marc Hassenzahl — Aesthetics in HCI HCI
Kurosu & Kashimura (1995); Tractinsky (1997 onwards). The research that established: users judge interface aesthetics in under 50ms, and those aesthetic judgments predict perceived usability more reliably than actual usability does. The empirical evidence for the Perception register.
04
Rick Rubin on AI and Point of View POV
"The reason we go to the artists, writers, filmmakers we love is for their point of view. The AI doesn't have one." The cleanest naming of what AI cannot do — and therefore what human judgment is for.
Part II · Further Reading
The broader reading that shaped the thinking, even where the essay doesn't quote directly from it. If you want to go deeper in any of the four ingredients or five registers, start here.
05
Sari Azout — What Matters in the Age of AI Is Taste
The Sublime, Feb 2025. "AI is powerful but taste-blind. It can make anything but has no idea what's worth making." Taste as what happens when you pay close attention to what moves you.
06
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — Essay on Intuition and Taste in the Age of AI COGNITION
October 2025. Taste-building as resistance training for the mind. Intuition as perceiving, taste as choosing, discernment as the act that joins them.
07
Sarah Guo — Conviction
"Taste isn't just design. It's the compound effect of ten thousand aligned decisions, each one reinforcing your point of view." The cleanest articulation of taste as a compounding asset.
08
Designative — Taste Is the New Bottleneck LEARNABILITY
February 2026. Taste as a learnable decision-making skill for builders and strategists in the age of AI. High-taste / low-expertise individuals gain unprecedented leverage when agents handle execution.
09
Pierre Bourdieu — Distinction
1979. The sociological argument that taste is socially trained and unequally distributed — a product of accumulated cultural exposure. The critical counter-argument to any romantic claim of natural good taste.
10
Immanuel Kant — Critique of Judgment
1790. The text every later argument about taste is arguing with. The distinction between taste of sense and taste of reflection — judgment, not just gratification. Still the starting point.
11
Herbert Simon — The Sciences of the Artificial
MIT Press, 1969. Decision-making as a joint product of environment structure and the actor's cognitive capacity. The foundational framing for why judgment under pressure is not a matter of pure intuition — it is a matter of what the situation affords.
12
Jenny Wen — Why Designers Can No Longer Trust the Design Process CRAFT
Hatch Conference, Berlin. The argument that craft is the new differentiator when AI commoditizes speed. Builder judgment over process worship.
13
Josh Clark — AI Is Your New Design Material
2019. The framing that aged best: AI is a material with a grain. A builder's first obligation with any new material is to learn where it splits, bends, and resists.
14
Elizabeth Goodspeed — On the Importance of Taste
It's Nice That, Feb 2024. Taste as purposeful selection. Essential warning against the "cult of curation where the appearance of taste becomes the end in itself."
15
John Maeda — Design in Tech Reports, 2015–2025
Annual. Ten years of observations on design's relationship to technology. Key claim, 2025: "Human curation, judgment, and sensibility remain vital differentiators for the foreseeable future."
16
Michael Polanyi — The Tacit Dimension
Doubleday, 1966. "We can know more than we can tell." The foundational argument for tacit knowledge — what transfers only through proximity, not instruction. Grounds the Transmission register.
17
Jorn van Dijk (Framer) — On AI and Curation
2025–2026 interviews. "Makers must evolve into curators and strategists, using AI as a collaborator rather than a replacement." Notable for coming from a practitioner who built an AI tool himself.
18
Maly Ly — The Taste Advantage
2025. On the economics of abundance. Taste as "a compass that points toward what should exist next."
19
Waterfield — The Power of Taste in the Age of AI
Medium, Jan 2025. The "efficiency paradox": as AI gets better at optimizing, the ability to choose what to optimize for becomes exponentially more valuable.
Dilip Jagadeesh · A practitioner's field guide
2026 · Edition 02 · Draft