The Anxiety of Taste
On Distinction in the Age of AI
The idea that taste is something that will save designers in the age of AI has been increasingly circulating on social media, design blogs, and talks the last couple of years. It is a conviction to endure human creativity in the face of technological encroachment. Beneath this idea, however, is an anxiety about what happens when a marker of status we may have built our identities upon is being shifted. It is an indicator of a fear of losing social and professional standing or becoming indistinct or replaceable (de Botton 2004). More specifically in design, it is an unease about what design becomes when craft, judgment, and even imagination can be rendered with less and less human control.
Taste1, in this discourse, is a foothold against uncertainty. It is believed to be what machines cannot replicate: the human quality that makes design distinct from automation. Yet, such reassurance feels shallow. It assumes that taste is a stable “possession,” a property of the individual rather than a social and cultural iteration.
The making of taste
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) describes taste as a social mechanism that transform cultural preferences into hierarchies of value. What considered a good taste is not a universal sensitivity but a product of habitus or the dispositions shaped by class, education, and social positioning. Taste as a marker of distinction allows people with access to certain forms of cultural capital to separate themselves from others, and, by doing so, normalising or naturalising inequality through aesthetic judgement.
Anthropologically, aesthetic is never only about style, but also about meaning and relations. Clifford Geertz (1973) suggests that humans live in webs of significance of our own making. Taste as a cultural production is a layered system of value and interpretation through which people make the world intelligible. Aesthetic judgement is part of how such webs hold together. What we call taste is one way a community sustains coherence between form and value.
For example, Umeda people in Papua New Guinea do not evaluate artworks as objects of beauty, but as actors within social life. Body decorations and ritual design function as extensions of persons to persuade, protect, and recall ancestral relations (Gell 1998). Their aesthetic qualities are inseparable from their effectiveness and their roles. Beauty, in this sense, is not a matter of taste but efficacy. It is about how form participates in maintaining social relations and cosmological balance.
From this angle, taste is a situated way of holding a world together, a practice through which relations, meanings, and values become visible. To speak of taste, then, is always to speak of power and situatedness. What appears as aesthetic intuition is in fact a socially organised way of knowing and learning.
The anxiety of distinction
In design today, taste carries a function of marking the difference between professional and amateur, between human judgement and machine recreation. To say “taste will save designers in the age of AI” does more than simply celebrating aesthetic expertise, it attempts to preserve that boundary. Designers are imagined as the last arbiter of sensibility, something unique that algorithms and amateurs cannot.
Yet this distinction is increasingly unstable. Models are trained on vast archives of images, interfaces, and artefacts. They are fed with visual grammars of what has been historically celebrated as good design. AI systems are not imitating taste from the outside, but rather reproducing it from within. What we call “taste” is already encoded, distributed, standardised, and reproducible.
Taste now operates as a form of infrastructure, which means the role of designers is entangled in systems of automation and circulation. Platforms distribute templates of “good design” at scale from interface kits to brand palettes. Taste becomes even more collective, procedural, and iterative. It is produced by the ongoing interactions between humans, machines, and institutions.
The comfort of taste as distinction, therefore, falters because, when taste becomes hyper-iterative through the interactions between human and machines, the lines between human uniqueness and machine reproducibles start to disappear. By aiming for hegemonic languages of form, we are reproducing the very aesthetic orders that are in turn automated. The desire to protect the human in design becomes, paradoxically, a mechanism of repetition.
Taste beyond distinction
To see taste as a saviour is to enter a survival mode. But survival mode narrows vision. It turns a living practice into a defensive position and shifts the attention from how we might exist or challenge the recursion ethically to how we might protect a few of us from it. As the boundaries that taste enforced are increasingly porous, to insist on taste as salvation is simply a response to nostalgia and classist hierarchy.
Instead, an important task for designers might be to reimagine what taste might be as a process of meaning making. If taste once functioned as a boundary for distinction, what would taste reveal as a practice of relation - of how values are translated, related, and imagined as forms? Furthermore, how does our responsibility look like when we shift away from defending a monopoly on judgement to questioning whose sensibilities taste privilege, whose worlds it obscures, and what form of appropriation and exploitation it enables.
To design today may mean to remain aware of the entanglements and to trace how taste circulates. It also means to look for ways of meaning-making that do not rely on hegemonic hierarchies of value. How can design sustain plurality rather than standardisation? How can we open space for difference instead of compression?
Ezio Manzini (2015) once asked what it means to “design when everybody designs.” Perhaps now is the moment to ask what it means to design when everybody and everything designs. As taste can no longer be defined by the ability to produce distinction, our expertise may instead be found in navigating complexity, negotiating meaning, and acting with care in the shared systems of creation. To imagine taste beyond distinction, in this sense, would mean to participate in meaning-making as an ongoing distributed act. As when creative expertise is interwoven into infrastructure, we may need to turn to shared creative agency.
References:
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
de Botton, A. (2005) Status Anxiety. London: Penguin Books.
Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Gell, A. (1998) Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Although there is no single definition shared by those who see taste as design’s safeguard in the age of AI, the sentiment typically rests on taste as a hegemonic sense of “sense.” Here I refer to taste as a commonly held belief within design discourse of an innate, cultivated sensibility that allows experienced designers to discern what is “good” or “bad,” what “works” and what “doesn’t.”