TasteAsEngineering [principle] v1.0.0

Aesthetic taste in design is an engineering discipline: it is learnable, reproducible, testable, and decomposable into specific decisions. 'Good taste' is not a mystical quality — it is the sum of many small, specific, evidence-informed design decisions, each of which can be named, documented, and enforced in a knowledge system.

Implications

• Every aesthetic choice should be nameable and documentable as an atom.
• If you cannot explain why a design decision is correct in concrete terms, it is a hunch — test it before shipping.
• The opposite of good taste is not bad taste — it is unexamined taste. Examining any taste systematically is the engineering discipline.

TasteAsEngineering [principle] v1.0.0

Aesthetic taste in design is an engineering discipline: it is learnable, reproducible, testable, and decomposable into specific decisions. 'Good taste' is not a mystical quality — it is the sum of many small, specific, evidence-informed design decisions, each of which can be named, documented, and enforced in a knowledge system.

Implications

• Every aesthetic choice should be nameable and documentable as an atom.
• If you cannot explain why a design decision is correct in concrete terms, it is a hunch — test it before shipping.
• The opposite of good taste is not bad taste — it is unexamined taste. Examining any taste systematically is the engineering discipline.

Rationale

Treating taste as intuition makes it unteachable and inconsistent across contributors. Treating taste as engineering — naming each decision, documenting its rationale, testing it against alternatives — makes it scalable. Prime Wiki exists precisely to encode taste as structured, retrievable atoms rather than locked-in individual sensibility.