Heres my Christmas wish this year: I wish everybody would just quit redesigning everything.Take Jaguars recent highly publicized rebranding.Im still trying to figure out what that bevy of angular models prancing around in a circa-2008 iPod ad palette has to do with the companys commitment to going all-EV in 2025.But my main takeaway from the campaign was that Jaguar has been trying for an awful long time (and apparently without much success) to get Americans to adopt its British pronunciation (Jag-You-Are).Every year a few giantsPaypal, Pepsi, Nokia are recent examplesand countless minor players redesign their presentation in ways that are not really good or bad, but simply different.This annoys me on a level of principle. When it comes to small, basically arbitrary changes in the fabric of daily life, I am the first to admit that Im more conservative than the love-child of Edmund Burke and Margaret Thatcher. A few years ago, Philadelphias 30th Street Station replaced its distinctive click-clack analog flipboard with a silent digital model, and I nearly launched a one-woman riot. When a beloved meatball shop closed, I sank into a fit of depressive mourning.It is bad enough that the old keep dying and the babies keep growing. The least we could do is have the common courtesy to keep everything else exactly the same always.At this point in my rant, someone usually points out that everything I love was, at some point, new, and as likely as not replaced something old; that I am fulminating against the fundamental and inexorable processes of time and metabolism themselves. This line of argument I consider a mere cop-out, an appeal to primordial authority. As Vincent Gardenia so memorably puts it in Moonstruck: Everything is temporary! That dont excuse nothing!Incessant UI tinkeringNowhere is the temporariness of everything (which I persist in hating) more obvious and inescapable than online. But even worse than surface design changes are the minor tinkerings with user interfaces. The loss of Google reader was tragic. Instagrams reshuffling of the sharing process has proved mildly maddening (I have never once remembered where the new share button is without the help of a prompt).Merely annoying have been Twitters (sorry, Xs) regular tweaks to the like, share, and retweet functions over the years. Apple seems to update the minor hardware requirements for dongles and accessories with each new launch. Design and redesign at best seem to exist in space, unmoored from beauty or utility. At worst, they seem a project to constantly make my life minutely but measurably more annoying.The designer has always had a privileged position within the system of mass production. A heady mix of craftsman, artist, and technocrat, the designer (theoretically) discovers and creates the beautiful, useful, fitting shape to fill a consumer need, which workers and machines in factories all over the world make real in a thousand automated processes. In doing so, the designer helps determine the texture of daily life for millions. But with the blossoming of life online, barriers to entry for a slice of this kingly power have fallen dramatically. Suddenly, it wasnt just objects forming the material of daily lifeit was interfaces. Graphic design and UX design have seen explosive growth over the past two decades. Hence, the proliferation of redesigns.Stop iterating!Good design, I know, is fundamentally republican, seeking to enact the will of the users. So, here is my request to the collective product owners and marketing departments of America: Could we stop? Stop redesigning. Stop iterating. Stop fiddling with the buttons. Stop trying to build a better instant pot. Stop deploying those sinister little pop-ups that say, Hey! You may notice a few changes around these parts!Part of the promise of the design era, I know, is that if we keep iterating, keep A/B testing, we will get closer and closer to the user experience that solves all imaginable problems, fulfills desires people didnt even know they had, and ushers in a golden age of social progress while finding a fool-proof way to monetize a free service. But when I think back on all the little adjustments Ive adapted to over the years, Im hard-pressed to think of one that came anywhere near to living up to a fraction of these lofty goalsor even the more modest goal of unambiguously positive change.The You/I updateWhen some facet of UX gets updated, this means you, the consumer, also need to get updated. And it is never as easy as it sounds.Old person problems are all of our problems, sooner or later.At some point, most of us realize that we will spend a great portion of our lives outside that first flush of youth when the mind is a sponge and the body is a rubber band. This may prompt us to do many things: Stop pretending were going to learn French, stop eating drug-store ramen three meals a day, develop a weightlifting practice, take up sudoku.For me, it means culling anything that requires me to learn how to use it more than once. I was grandfathered into Apples intuitive design in my teens. I will not be learning again. I doubt it would go as fast this time around. And I have no interest in using that timetime I could spend learning to knit or read polyphonic music notation or making mead or simply sitting in the sun with a fishing rod and a beerto relearn how a cursor is supposed to work or figure out where the startup menu is in this iteration.I know that I am fundamentally on the losing side here. People change, their needs and desires change, and so the things we make will change with them. But youd be hard-pressed to convince me that human need drives the constant updates to the user experience of liferather than design for designs sake.