In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and vari

In a lecture about the universal characteristics of classical architecture, professor Nathaniel Walker argued that human beings crave two things: order and variety. If there's too much order, it's boring and oppressive. If there's too much variety, it's chaotic and unpleasant. In his view, classical architecture all over the world aims at creating a "delicate balance between order and variety." Jazz educator Jerry Coker made the same point about music, that to be pleasurable it must strike the right balance between familiarity and novelty. A metaphor for “familiar” and “novel” in music is to imagine that as we listen, we are “playing along in our head.” When we are correct about where the music is going next, it feels familiar. When we are surprised by it doing something else, we find it novel. Jazz that is too familiar is boring, we never are surprised, it never pushes our brain to rewire itself to accept “the new familiar.” Jazz that is too novel sounds like a chaotic mess: We cannot learn to predict it because its novelty is not built on top of a base of familiarity we can work with. The key insight that builds on top of this is that ”familiar” and “novel” are not absolutes: They vary from person to person based on their tastes and experiences. This leads to the notion of progression. When you find music that has the right balance for you, after a while what used to be novel becomes familiar, and your tastes evolve to appreciate music that adds novelty to the music you used to find balanced, but now find overly familiar. Your tastes are evolving, as most people’s tastes do. It’s never quite as cut-and-dry as that, but this notion of “a balance between familiar and novel” seems to fit a lot of aesthetic tastes, and the notion that to maintain that balance, people’s tastes evolve over time also seems to fit a lot of people’s experiences. The challenge is that as a practitioner, your personal tastes may go beyond the tastes of your audience. So either you must bring them along to where you are, create for them but not entirely for yourself, or find an audience who is in roughly the same place in their journey and will delight in the new experiences you discover for yourself. I am personally lazy, so as a blogger I always wrote for myself and let the internet sort out who would find my stuff about programming too familiar to be interesting, who would find it to avant-garde to be interesting, and who found it familiar enough to be understandable, yet novel enough to be interesting. Alas, buildings aren’t blog posts or pieces of music. When building them, you can’t always leave it up to the world to sort out who likes them and who doesn’t, you usually have a specific brief to satisfy a specific audience and society, and you should design for where their tastes are. p.s. And yes, this does apply to software design for those who take aesthetic pleasure in the code itself.