Guilty Pleasures Taste, Design, and Democracy

What is the relationship between design and taste in the twenty‐first century? Anyone addressing this question is faced with a continually expanding definition of design1 accompanied by a diminished sense of the usefulness of judgments on “good taste” and “bad taste.” Distinctions of taste are associated with connoisseurship and thus with design objects or particular lineages of design practice, rather than being aligned with a new emphasis on the social significance of design practice and the social responsibility of the designer. Discriminating judgments on individual design objects do not seem to fit well with a current focus on product life cycles and design for the circular economy. It could therefore be said that the “problem of taste” in contemporary design has become the problem of how to eliminate binary distinctions of good taste and bad taste from design discourse. In this chapter, the issues that arise when the social practice of design is discussed in the context of the social practice of taste, are reconsidered within a framework set by the historically determined “project” of middle‐class taste.

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