Taste: Media & Interior Design examines the evolution of what taste is, how it works and what it does.
This book examines the recursive relationship between taste and media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts.
This book aims to recuperate a term long dismissed as distinct from legitimate design. This misunderstanding veils taste’s role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting its producers and consumers. This text is also an invitation to produce and consume all media critically, with an awareness that any mediation expresses a point-of-view.
This text stakes a claim for interior design theory as distinct from architectural theory. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it.
Taste: Media & Interior Design describes a series of moments in the evolution of taste since the 19th century. The text is organized in a rough chronology vis-a-vis media, from books to emergent technologies. Each chapter includes analysis and design case studies contemporary to moments representing critical change, and more recent examples as well. Referenced texts are drawn both scholarly and popular writing from an array of disciplines: philosophy, sociology, art and design theory and criticism.