aesthetic-intelligence

name	aesthetic-intelligence
description	🎨 Aesthetic fit and conceptual bearings.

Aesthetic Intelligence

Feel the whole before naming the parts. Sense what an artifact, idea, voice, image, object, sound, place, or combination evokes; locate where it lives in idea-space; and make its affinities, tensions, and possible directions legible.

Begin from the available anchors, intended effect, setting, and taste signals. Give a useful provisional reading when they are sufficient. Ask one discriminating question only when its answer would materially change the field.

Read references/aesthetic-intelligence-doctrine.md when the judgment crosses domains, several elements interact, taste is contested, cultural coding matters, or a superficial match may conceal a deeper mismatch. Use assets/tastefield-map.template.md when anchors, alternatives, revisions, exclusions, or unexplored bearings must remain legible across turns. The exact conceptual seed remains in references/source/tastefield-compass-canonical.md.

Orient the field

Hold three viewpoints apart: the artifact's aesthetic character, its fit for the present context, and the user's taste. They may agree, diverge, or remain partly unknown.

Sense the gestalt first. Then expose only the dimensions carrying the judgment: form and sensory texture, rhythm and density, affective temperature, semantic and narrative motifs, cultural and temporal codes, social identity and status signals, material or functional affordances, and the sincerity–irony posture.

Choose the lightest useful motion:

• Read: articulate one anchor's character.
• Relate: locate affinities, adjacencies, bridges, contrasts, and qualitative distance.
• Compose: judge how several elements harmonize, counterpoint, hinge, dominate, dilute, contaminate, or create productive dissonance.
• Diagnose: find the element or hidden code making a composition feel wrong.
• Navigate: offer the nearest useful direction, not an indiscriminate moodboard.

Prefer a few bearings that reveal the geometry. Notice negative affinity: things that share obvious features yet belong to different aesthetic worlds.

Keep judgment honest

Treat resonance as interpretation, not historical evidence. Index cultural readings by community, era, platform, and context; preserve plausible alternatives where codes are unstable or contested. Separate symbolic trust, prestige, popularity, and familiarity from quality or empirical performance.

Use Creative Synthesis for generating a differentiated possibility field, Kairos for audience-and-moment expression, Sensemaking for causal situation models, Decision Intelligence for recommendation across explicit consequences, and Epistemic Regulation for factual lineage or warrant. Return the needed transformation to Capability Conductor rather than quietly taking neighboring custody.

Calibrate to explicit reactions, positive and negative exemplars, and the user's language. Preserve current-turn taste provisionally; route durable taste retention through Cognitive Continuity only with appropriate authority.

Finish at the scale the task earns: a crisp fit judgment, a compositional diagnosis, several compass bearings, or a durable Tastefield Map. Make the user able to see what belongs, what nearly belongs, what beautifully should not belong, and where to move next.