The Joy of Trial and Error: Pushing the Limits of What You Like
Taste Experimentation is where you put your observations into practice. You test your tastes, experiment with things that you are not totally sure of, maybe feel slightly out of your comfort zone. This is a necessary phase of the process as it makes you realize the difference between what you know you like and what you know you like once you’ve actually lived it. And the reason you can take the risk to experiment is because you understand that it is all temporary, and every decision, right or wrong, will help you learn for the future.
The advantage of experimenting is that it’s low cost and high benefit. Try an article of clothing in an unusual color, arrange furniture in an unconventional way, or combine materials that are supposed to clash. Each micro-gamble allows us to create a tangible experience that we can assess honestly. How did I feel about the fire-engine red? What was it like to sit on something with that particular texture? Only by trying things in real life can we figure out what we like. Enough experiments and our edges start to sharpen.
The key thing at this level is to decouple taste from ego. If it doesn’t work, it’s not a taste failure — it’s just information. This keeps you from getting stuck as so many do. You’re not aiming for immediate results, you’re just exploring — hypothesize, test, observe, refine. Everything becomes a design experiment in which failure is not just okay, but encouraged as a way to learn faster. You slowly stop caring about “failure,” and start getting really curious about what will happen if you just take it one more step.
As we continue to experiment and actually try things out on purpose, we start to notice that the same color combinations are repeating themselves, the same ratios of things are consistently pleasing to us, the same textures are making us feel the way we want to feel. These repeated items and themes are the ingredients of our own personal signature style. We start to see that our favorite coffee mug, the way we arrange the books on our shelves, and the type of lighting we prefer to work with all sing in harmony. They don’t do it because we’re trying to force them to. It just naturally happens after lots of trial and error.
The ultimate reward of experimentation is freedom. With enough experimentation and contemplation, we learn to not just say no to the things that aren’t right for us, but yes to the things that are, without any explanation or justification. Taste starts to become less about a curated list of “right” objects, and more about cultivating a way of life that is a precise expression of ourselves in that moment. There will always be more decisions to make and more directions to go in, but it doesn’t feel heavy anymore, because we have faith in our ability to make those decisions. Experimentation isn’t something that happens in a limited time, it’s what will always be a part of our personal taste evolving and being truly our own.
