A Sense Doesn't Cross Over by Explanation

In design work, there's a line I hear often. When someone with a good eye brings in a mood board and says, "isn't this pretty," that's just their personal taste — a director, the argument goes, should be able to persuade the client with logic about why something is actually needed.

It's not wrong. In front of a client, "because it's pretty" won't carry the work forward. You need to be able to say why this layout, why this material, for things to move. Building that argument is a real skill in its own right. Still, every time I heard this, something nagged at me. The line starts by talking about a sense for design and ends by talking about taste, as if the two were the same thing.

Taste is more complicated than it looks. You think, "this is just my taste," but mixed in there is which group you want to belong to, what's trending right now, what you want to own. Untangling all of that would take a separate piece on its own. Here I'll just note that taste is that kind of mixed bundle. Which is why taste makes sense once someone explains it to you — and why, if you set your mind to it, you can fake having it.

A sense for something is a little different. A person who has it may not be able to prove anything on the spot, but they can point and say, "look here." Taste usually calls a whole thing good; a sense for something points at one particular spot. I draw the line between the two by whether or not someone can point.

So what is this sense, then? In my own words, it's a state where what you've seen and done has piled up in your own particular way, to the point that judgment arrives before reasoning does. If one lattice cell is a touch too flat, it catches your eye before you ever pick up a ruler. You only find out why it caught your eye after you've measured it. That's because the standard you're comparing against lives in your body, not your head.

But what piles up differs from person to person, because people process the same thing differently. One person's eye registers the cell as flat; the person next to them just sees a cell. This is also why a sense for something can point but struggles to prove itself on the spot. It's not that there's no basis for it — it's that the result was processed by your own body in your own way, and you can't simply pull it out and hand it over as-is. That's about as far as I can explain what this sense is. And reading this explanation still won't make the cell start looking flat to you.

On the job, the "logic" people reach for is often a coat tailored after the fact onto a judgment already made. Tailoring a good coat is a skill in itself. But a coat is not a body. You can take off a coat and hand it over; you cannot lend out a body. However carefully you explain, however many numbers you lay against a ruler, what the listener walks away with is the coat. And the same coat drapes differently on a different body.

Not knowing this makes the work genuinely exhausting. You believe that explaining it will get through, so you explain it again, and when that still doesn't land, you start to think the other person just isn't trying. The listener is just as frustrated — they understood you, so they can't tell why you're still saying no. The work stalls somewhere in between.

Once you accept that a sense for something isn't territory you can explain someone into understanding, the work actually starts moving. That doesn't mean you stop explaining — I still explain. I just stop expecting the explanation itself to carry that sense across. Instead, I point. Looking at the same spot together is as far as I can go; what happens after that, I think, is up to time working inside the other person's body.

Thinking about it, the people who point things out to me now probably couldn't always see them either. I certainly couldn't, at first. When I'd just started in design, a senior colleague with an engineering background once went through my work and pointed out one thing after another — the proportion of a line here, an angle there, small details like that. Privately, I brushed it off, thinking, what would an engineer know about design. It took me years to understand that he'd been right. Looking back now, what he'd been doing was exactly that act of pointing. It wasn't that he'd under-explained and I'd failed to follow.

My body simply hadn't gotten there yet.

Learning carpentry, I went through that same stretch of time once more. The years I spent at my teacher's side were like that.

It was nothing but frustrating at the time, but looking back, I don't think there was much other way for that sense to cross over.