Cultural Probes

“To encourage a provocative dialogue about design, we tried to reject stereotypes of older people as “needy” or “nice.” This freed us, in turn, to challenge the elder groups, both through the probes and our eventual designs.”

It can be pretty tough to get stereotypical notions out of your head, because they can be so ingrained in your thought process. But if you are going to go through a process like this to discover the way a group of people thinks about an assortment of subjects, looking past stereotypes has to be one of your first goals. Otherwise what is the point?

This got me to thinking about how we have ideas of “types” of people in our mind as we design. Old people, math people, outdoorsy people. We need to be thinking about who we are designing for, and unfortunately we wont be able to do extensive probes such as this on every project; so where is the line between it being okay to design with preconceived notions in mind, and when is it not?
More questions: Are stereotypes always a bad thing? Where exactly do they come from? How do stereotypes evolve over time/ how can some sort of event (ie. a war, shift in pop culture) change an existing stereotype?