SHARE—the tyranny of taste

Taste or intuition is a difficult subject to discuss, it’s something we’re taught to distrust, or disparagingly, “leave it up to the women to decide”.

In Britain we don’t value our emotions, our intuitive responses to the world around us. This goes some way towards explaining why we got our social housing programmes on the sixties and seventies so wrong. We built housing schemes the size of entire towns, driven by money and numbers, taking no account of how the end result looked or felt. No matter how well a building functions; if it looks awful or feels wrong, because it’s made of inappropriate materials or it’s miles from shops and schools, it won’t work, occupants will want to leave it or vandalise and destroy it.

Lots of research has been done on vandalism and it’s been proven that people tend not to vandalise things which are well made from appropriate materials. Page & Park Architects knew this when they designed the Italian Centre pedestrian areas and Cathedral Square. Both areas contain use high quality finishes, form nice spaces which people want to spend time in and use artworks and sculpture to add additional interest for the beholder.

However architects and designers don’t have a monopoly on good design, they only had the benefit of a design education. We’re all capable of being good designers, of having good taste, of understanding and using our intuition, because we can learn from our own reactions to the world around us. We are all capable of being in control of the choices we make and confident that we are making decisions which will work. All we need to have is a basic understanding of how the physical world around us works and what the rules are. In order to do this we need to understand what we mean by design and what I think we mean by the word taste.

All architects and fine artists are also designers—they all use the same creative process and the same sensorial language, maniplating us through what we see, hear, feel, smell, touch and even taste. Architects aren’t better than product designers or anyone else for that matter, they just have a particular set of skills which allow them to build big and very noticeable objects which people feel are important because they last a long time and often cost a lot of money.

When commissioning design it’s important to remember that we are all human and respond to the world in roughly the same way. We are all capable of changing the world around us for the better we are all capable of being creative.

Designers use all of the senses when they design objects, buildings and environments, not only the evidence of their eyes—that’s only one dimension. This is easily demonstrated—if you go into a church, close your eyes, feel the drop in temperature, hear the echo and smell the musty air. All our senses help us build a more complete and multi-dimensional picture of our environment than our eyes alone could do. Our sense of smell is thought by many experts to be the most powerful of our senses because it can evoke powerful memories which take us back to a specific time and place.

As a country we really undervalue our senses which is foolish as our senses tell us what to buy and how to live. The UK has recently had a disastrous record in manufacturing because we make products which work but which don’t appeal to people, we have lost out to countries such as Japan and Germany who produce more expensive goods that work and look better and give reliability.

The ability to design, to make things look good or work effectively, is something we can all learn. Design is a well documented process, it’s properly called the creative process, a means by which we consciously control the way an idea or an object or a building evolves and takes shape, step by step. This process can be very long in the case of buildings because they’re complicated objects to produce and the process requires much negotiation and development along the way to take into account the needs of different groups; the client, those who’ll live in the building, those who’ll maintain the building, the known technology of the day and the guidance of planning and statutory authorities who articulate and control local and contextual needs. We don’t create buildings or chairs or clothes in isolation, we develop ideas and exchange and change ideas according to the information we have, according to materials, according to how the finished building will be used. Start to question why certain materials are appropriate in some rooms but not in others. Flowers and ‘fluffy pink’ can be okay in the bedroom but not in the living room or kitchen?

Designers construct a brief, in conjunction with the client or end-user, which might define who will live in the house. Where the house will be situated. Where it lies in relation to the sun and its neighbours. What its dimensions, materials can be. What current legislation, historical context can effect its eventual shape. Design is a process of continual negotiation and testing.

Some of the best designed products and buildings work especially well because they provide solutions which work at lots of different levels—someone once said, “You get from Art what you take to Art”. This is really true, as our own experiences shape what knowledge we take to and get from any situation—maybe you’ll find a house attractive because it has a secure entry, good sized rooms which are inexpensive to heat and nice big windows with good views, someone else might agree with you on all these points but also appreciate that the materials used for the door frames are Scottish hardwoods or that the door handles are of the correct period to correspond with the original age of the building. Someone else might think the flat is similar to one they’ve seen in a film and that makes it more special for them. All of our different opinions are valid.

Our ability as humans to see and share different private worlds is special. We should celebrate difference rather than condemn people for having different opinions. We should try to understand why we like and dislike our instinctive choices and measure our choices by discussing with one another how appropriate a house is—this helps listen to other people and also gives us confidence in our own opinions.

Remember, there are as many solutions to any one problem as there are people in the world although some solutions will be better then others.

Good design should perform more than it’s most basic, utilitarian function—for instance, we don’t need chairs to sit down, we can sit on the floor. But chairs allow us to sit in a particular way which says something additional about the kind of people we are and how we like to be seen. We often judge our friends by the music they listen to, the television programmes they watch, the clothes they wear and the team they support.

The objects we choose to buy and live with also tell us a lot about ourselves. Objects dramatise our lives, they are the backdrop against which we act out our everyday lives. How they look and behave affects how we feel about them and how we interact with them and each other (bank refits and Stalinist bru).

The hotel is a good example of how we and the environment work. Architecture and objects provide the theatrical backdrop for big set piece performances in the dining room three times a day and a continuous performance in the front lobby. Our ritualistic behaviour in a hotel shapes the building which in turn forces us to use it in a particular way. Houses perform a similar task, balancing outside and inside space, public and the private space and giving areas which promote family activites, childrens’ play and social interaction and amentities such as workspace and shopping.

The more things you experience in life the greater the resource you have to draw upon when choosing how to live, the kind of home you’d like to live in and the kind of objects you want to surround yourself with. Sydney Devine and Scottish Opera are at opposite ends of the spectrum but there both good in different ways.

There’s no such thing as bad taste, everyone has different taste—we just have to recognise that people see the world differently and understand what each of us is trying to communicate through the objects we choose to live with.

However, there is such a thing as bad design, where objects and architecture fail to perform even the simplest functions or fail to recognise the complexity of the function they were designed to perform and end up being patronising or demeaning—social housing in the ’60s and ’70s was a provide perfect examples with their radical ideas about hygiene and stupid, simplistic theorising about ideal social groupings like the nuclear family. Some solutions are bad because they are over complicated, mixing and clashing too much contrasting information.

Much of ‘design’, or ‘taste’, is about confidence as well as experience. None of us would be very confident about reading or writing if we hadn’t been taught to at school. We all left school knowing how to read and write but not knowing how to see or feel. We aren’t really taught to understand the physical world about us visually or through our senses, to decode it and learn to recognise how we express our different ways of living through buildings, environments and objects. This is sad and wrong and not our fault. We’re all late beginners when it comes to seeing and feeling.

It’s important to understand that it’s very difficult for someone to make you look silly if you have a strong opinion about an object or environment and you’ll get better at expressing your point of view the more you talk about it. People only make others look silly for choosing to like something because they don’t understand it. It’s a defence mechanism. No-one can have wrong taste you can only have your own taste which will develop throughout your life. So, ask lots of questions: ask yourself why you like your local pub, why you like your shoes or your kettle and start to analyse why you feel strongly about things and you’ll start to find out some things about yourself which you never knew before.

Consider the objects around you:

-shape
-light/heavy
-soft/hard
-warm/cold
-loud/quiet
-what does it remind you of?