#00 An Intro to The Taste Archive

997 pins. That’s how many images live on a Pinterest board I created a few months ago, and very aptly named ‘CRAP’. I’d love to tell you it stands for something mildly intelligent — Collection of Random Aesthetic Preferences, maybe — but it doesn’t. It was called CRAP because, at the time, that’s exactly what I thought it was: a place to dump anything I found remotely aesthetically pleasing, with no real logic, ambition, or greater purpose behind it.

Despite its humble beginnings, today CRAP has become my most precious creative tool.

Every time I want to pick up my phone for doom-scrolling, I divert to CRAP instead. Over countless commutes, waiting rooms and lunch breaks, instead of succumbing to the powers of social media, I spend my time scrolling on Pinterest, saving anything and everything I find remotely interesting onto CRAP.

It turns out that feeding your brain a steady diet of beautiful nonsense is not entirely unproductive.

The usefulness of CRAP depends, in part, on its stupidity. The moment it becomes a polished archive of refined preferences, the experiment is over. Its value lies in instinct, speed, and the suspension of self-consciousness. For that reason, CRAP operates under a set of very strict rules.

1. One must not spend longer than three seconds deciding whether something deserves to be pinned. If it made one stop scrolling, that is reason enough.

2. One must not review CRAP immediately after a pinning session. It should be revisited only once a week, or thereabouts.

3. Once something has been pinned, it cannot be un-pinned simply because one later decides against it.

4. And finally, one must pin everything one likes: fashion, art, landscapes, objects, rooms, gestures, colours. Anything, in short, can be a source of inspiration.

The more time I spent reviewing CRAP, the more it began to resemble less a random dumping ground and more a record of recurring visual fixations. Certain interests appeared obliquely: an attraction to animal print, for instance, emerging through horse manes, heavy coats and patterned rugs. At other moments, I noticed a pull towards elongated figures, or chrome furniture. Taste, it seems, has a habit of revealing itself sideways.

And slowly, CRAP has taught me to articulate my taste — if not neatly, then at least truthfully.

So every two weeks, I’ll return to the board, identify the fixation rising to the surface, and do what I always do when I want to understand something properly: write my way into it.

Because no personal research project works well without a methodology, The Taste Archive will follow a replicable pattern.

1. The Thing - What am I obsessed with lately?

2. The Context - What is this thing’s relationship to history, art, culture and society, and why am I suddenly interested in this?

3. The Mistake - How can the thing go wrong in design?

4. The Execution - How can the thing be applied to design correctly?

Every two weeks, then, this archive will grow.

Some entries may be about objects, some about textures, some about silhouettes or materials. Some might be fleeting obsessions, others more enduring patterns. Ultimately, all of them will begin in the same place: a moment of instinct, somewhere inside a Pinterest board called CRAP.