Taste and Desires: How are they acquired?
Reflection Week 10: Design and the Human Condition
This week's class started off with a question on 'taste'. We discussed why we liked what we did by taking music as an example. What conditions, experiences, narratives had shaped our preferences for not just music, but all our choices and likes or dislikes.
If you asked my sister, she would tell you that as the youngest, I copied her personality. A fact I wouldnever admit to her but in some ways she is right. I started listening to My Chemical Romance because she did, I started dressing similarly to her and a lot of my socio-political views have been influenced by her. This shows now taste and likes can be acquired through the conditioning done by our environment.
According to French sociologist, Pierre Bordieu, these external forces that affect what we like or dislike are, influenced by social, economic and cultural capital.
Cultural capital is how power is transferred in society and social classes are maintained through non-economic resources such as knowledge, exposure and education that go on to enable social mobility. Social capital includes economic resources that allow net working, making connections and being part of certain groups. Economic capital refers to monetary resources like money which enable you to purchase something to get your way.
All these capitals work together to shape our tastes. One may have a ‘taste’ for smoking to create social capital in a job or school environment. I remember watching a show where a junior designer had to take up smoking because her boss and peers discussed pitches on smoke breaks. Having lots of money gives you power and elevates you to a "higher"class, and so the economic capital may influence your tastes.
As designers,we need to be aware of how our users acquire taste so we can curate our design and products to fit. This ties back into mental models as well as understanding how the user thinks is imperative in creating something the user will like and want to use.
