Shower thought at work:

Why do we need this to convey message? Is it cool still to use wide spread perceptions of profession, status or expected traits to market products?

I think:

iconizing human stereotypes is a bad practice.

How do we encourage diversity if our inner representation of things are hammered again and again trough all possible channels. I get that this is easy since it does make a person more likely to act once they feel they know what you are talking about. But it makes you also a part in a bad thing happening for ages.

Humans are not affordances. A human is complex. You either symbolize human as a species or you work harder.

Of course, illustrators, cartoonists and other artists, even copywriters, need to work harder to get out of the stereotype box. But it pays.

And please this has nothing to to with Basecamp. Its an awesome product which i use daily.

This looks somewhat easy to fix:

Its far from good, but it does illustrate how you can avoid toxic stereotyping: do the stereotyping then shuffle! Then repeat 🙂 Yet its just more stereotyping on my side.

How should we get above our system one biases?