Why is taste really hard to teach and how does one improve taste if they cannot be taught?

When I say taste is hard to teach, I mean I haven't found a way to put it in a curriculum. If I have a designer who's a very good systems thinker but doesn't have the gestalt of the visual design layer, I've not been able to teach that to them. But I've been able to take people with a clear sense of taste from very diverse backgrounds and get them up to speed on interaction design and systems thinking.

Why is that? My favorite explanation is one Jared Spool used years ago about chicken sexing. Some people can identify the sex of a chick at two to three weeks, and you can get to 95% accuracy, but only after a couple years of study and a lengthy process of mentorship. Really good experience design is learned but not open to introspection. In other words, the people who have it can't fully explain how they do it, so they can't write it down for you.

It's also deeply contextual. The quintessential design answer to everything is "it depends," so a rule that works on one page breaks on the next. You can know all the rules, but it's really how your brain puts it all together. And the stuff that resonates most is rooted in feeling. Until you've lived a life, you don't have feeling, which is why taste builds up through experience rather than instruction.

So how do you get better? You learn it the slow way, by soaking in a lot of great work. Steve Jobs put it well back in 1994:

The catch is that 90% of everything is crap, according to Sturgeon's law, so you have to be picky about what you expose yourself to. Seek out the best stuff in your field and outside it.

Next, learn the fundamentals cold. Jazz players spend a ton of time learning scales so that when they start playing, they can forget about the scales and do what fits the music. Taste shows up once the rules are second nature.

Finally, build a feedback loop. With my own Ask LukeW system, the real work is constantly looking at the questions people ask, evaluating whether it responded well, and course correcting. That's applying taste, and doing it over and over is how it sharpens. Same goes for design work: make things, judge them against the best you've seen, and get feedback from people whose taste you trust (the chicken sexers got there through mentorship, after all).

Taste can't be handed to you in a class, but you can absolutely grow it through exposure, fundamentals, and lots of reps with honest feedback.