Judgment Is Not Decoration
Leonard Koren's Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers has lived on my bedside table for years. I read it when something feels off. When I have been thinking in English and Norwegian too long.
The book is small. Deliberately spare. The design enacts what it describes.
Most people read wabi-sabi as an aesthetic. The tea bowl with the crack. The asymmetric glaze. The visible repair. That reading misses the point.
Koren's argument is structural. Western beauty has always aimed at the Platonic ideal: complete, perfect, resolved. Wabi-sabi is a different cosmology entirely. It finds value in what is impermanent, unfinished, quietly present. Not as a style. As a way of understanding what things are for.
I have spent more than two decades in design rooms where this distinction gets collapsed. Beauty becomes a feeling. Feelings are subjective. Subjective things cannot be measured. Therefore beauty is optional. Nice to have. Icing on the cake.
I have watched that argument win every time.
But the argument is wrong. What gets dismissed as beauty is actually judgment. And judgment is not a feeling. It is a skill.
In any design process there are two axes. One is rational: does this align, does this function, does this solve the stated problem. That axis is measurable. AI can now navigate it faster than any human.
A felt sense of when something is right. Not perfect. Right. When to stop.
That is not taste. It is judgment. Developed across years of looking and making. It has consequences. You just cannot measure them.
AI has made this clearer, not less relevant. It produces correct outcomes at scale. It can optimize endlessly. What it cannot do is know when to stop. It has no sense of enough.
Wabi-sabi is not a philosophy of imperfection. It is a philosophy of sufficiency. Of knowing what to leave in and what to leave out, and understanding that those decisions are not decorative.
They are the work.