Taste: Media and Interior Design

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works, and what it does.

Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste’s role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste’s relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media and algorithms.

Written primarily for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically.