I appreciate aesthetic beauty of rooms, buildings, and interfaces, but to me what has jumped the shark is the entire conversation about icons, fonts, and toolba

I appreciate aesthetic beauty of rooms, buildings, and interfaces, but to me what has jumped the shark is the entire conversation about icons, fonts, and toolbars. No one can explain why the icons, fonts, and toolbars from 3 years ago aren't good enough anymore. No one can explain why we need constant "refreshers". Let's say you have a new microwave. Every microwave's controls are a little different, but you know generally the conventions of their limited interfaces. There are presets; separate non-microwave functions like timers; maybe a light and a fan control. The first few times you use it, it's a little weird. But you use the same one for like 5-10 years at a time. It becomes effortless, second nature. Food in, door shoot, beep-boop-beep by muscle-memory. Your food is ready. Imagine someone snuck into your home and rearranged the buttons, and changed some underlying functions. Now, when the timer is done, you don't hit the timer button to clear the display--you hold the cancel/stop button that also turns off the microwave. They think it's more logical that way. It doesn't matter, but it's frustrating. "Why was that necessary?", you might ask yourself. Neither way is fundamentally more or less logical. It's just different. It's not that changes are bad, but semi-annual changes for utilitarian things seem excessive. You accept a certain amount of change when you replace your microwave, or your car, or your computer. But not when you take your car to be tuned up. They don't replace the break pads, and then change the location of the stereo's volume knob. I think he philosophy of heavy handed redesign was useful in bringing computer interfaces to up to new hardware specs early on in tech, but we're reaching a point where they should be slowed down in favor of utility. The claim that it is design in the name of usability is no longer true. Call it what it is. It is merely seasonal fashion and nothing more. Some fashions are timeless. We should find them and stick with them as defaults that we are very hesitant to change. Consistency can facilitate clean design, allowing you to conceal and expose complexity by strongly established conventions, helping to achieve balance on the beauty-utility continuum.