Personal taste intelligence/In development
Same clay. Same glaze. Choose on instinct.
Taste is a form of intelligence. Most people have one long before they have language for it.
You know when something is yours. You know when a room is wrong. You usually can't say why — and nothing you use is built to tell you.
Pinterest gives you a pile. An algorithm gives you more of what you clicked. Neither gives you a thesis about yourself.
My Diamond Eye is an attempt at the harder thing: learning how a particular person sees, well enough to be useful at the moment of an actual decision.
You probably wouldn't choose this.
We think you should see it anyway.
Every recommendation system on earth is built to show you more of what you already like. That's a good way to sell things and a poor way to develop judgment.
We're interested in the opposite move — the object just outside your range that shares the qualities you actually value. And in the question nobody else will ask you: are you drawn to this, or to the way it was photographed?
Expensive is a price. Exceptional is a quality. They are not the same thing and we intend to keep saying so.
There is no product yet. There is a question, and a study designed to find out whether the answer is real.
We're testing whether a person's eye can be described specifically enough to be wrong — and usefully enough to change a decision. If it can't, we'd rather know now.
Two ways to follow along.
Essays on how taste forms and why it changes. Outside Your Eye, The Find, and occasional notes from the study. No product announcements, because there is no product.
Want to take part in the study? Twenty minutes of looking at images,
then three photographs of your own. You'll get a written reading of your eye.
It may well be wrong — that's the point.
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