Lego Cities Built on Holy Ground
A Personal Design Philosophy
by Emily Miller
This presentation was given at Senior Symposia 2023 in the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University (SC) on November 30, 2023.
Presentation Transcription
Hi, everyone. My name is Emily and I’m going to be talking about my design philosophy and how it came to be over the course of the last few months. At the start of this process, I thought that discovering and defining my personal design philosophy would be pretty straightforward. I know who I am and what I believe. I know what design is and what my experience has been with design. So finding my design philosophy can’t be that difficult, right?
All this knowledge of myself and of design was carried into the formation of my philosophy. The process to get there was far from what I expected. It looked a little bit more like this.
I chased curiosity full speed ahead, spending over two months researching Disney Imagineering and animation simply because their creative process has always fascinated me.
I hit major roadblocks that resulted in long conversations about feeling incapable, not excited and confused about where to go next. Where a question I dreaded was asked: What’s the scariest thing you could do right now? I responded by slowing down. I implemented the rhythm of going on a walk every day, connecting my mind and my body through movement and documenting my observations of beauty and new perspectives.
It allowed me to take a step back, ask myself lots of questions, and reflect on where my personality and passions fit in with what I believe to be true about design. I challenged myself to draw every day once again, connecting my mind and my body through movement, this time through my hand. It’s something I’ve always loved but felt really scared of not being able to do well.
I search for ways to make it fun and playful, making connections with the places I find enjoyment and my research on Disney. I started drawing my favorite Disney characters. I would watch a movie and study the characters in their ability to tell stories throughout each scene, replicating it in my own sketches.
I took on the challenge of documenting my emotions and experiences as they happened with the purpose of harnessing emotions, not stopping them.
This led to a lot of reflection and observation about how I interacted with the process of creating. It made me grateful. It challenged me and it freed me in a lot of ways. Yet again, I hit a roadblock and was left in what I call crisis mode. I felt a lot of doubt. I wondered if design was always going to lead me to fear.
I asked myself a lot of questions. I made a lot of lists that led me to generate new perspectives and flipped the narrative for myself.
What are the things that keep showing up in my exploration? How can I push past the need to be perfect in everything I create and to let people into those imperfect pieces? I may be prone to fear, but what about design can set me free from that.
I formed rhythms that allowed me to implement the things I’ve been learning about myself and my relationship to design in my day-to-day — rhythms of making and of being. I sought out ways to implement play. I felt like I was free to create like a child again, and I gained a new excitement for the stories I’ve held within me.
Despite the challenge of chasing down doubt and fear, I was determined to take things that were stretching my perspective of what design can be and use them to better myself as a creator and a person. After a long journey of exploration and discovery, I can look back and categorize the things that I’ve learned in two ways.
The first category being what I’ve established about my relationship to design and what I believe to be true about it. The second being the ideas I’ve uncovered about my perspective of design that have been there all along since I was a child.
The ideas in each of these categories feel strongly intertwined, connected to each other in ways I could have never anticipated. They have been embedded into my design philosophy.
Concerning the latter category: the ideas are framed through a story from my childhood that has become a metaphor for how I intersect with design.
I, along with my sister and a neighbor, spent a whole summer building a Lego city when we were kids that covered the floor of my childhood playroom. I’m sure it didn’t start with any sort of grand or detailed plan, but rather just playing for the sake of play and for a desire to create. It was about having fun, building new worlds, and transforming a space into something that had only existed in our heads before.
It was about taking the material at hand and being the ones to decide what it could become. There was no rush, no fear of doing it wrong and no limitation to what could be made.
I don’t know for sure that this is how it happened, but I can imagine that my sister and I built a few different buildings, started to play with them together, and one thing probably led to another. We were asking, do you think we can make a whole city? We were curious about what else we could do, how we could go bigger and better and figure out a way to build a world that we imagined in our minds. I’m sure we probably went crazy with the need to make it happen, but I guess that’s what curiosity does.
There were no instruction manuals. I always preferred to combine all of the bricks and choose how I wanted to configure them to create something new — something that wasn’t very thought out for me. With imagination running wild our Lego city had a castle tower next to the airport runway. It had skiers going down a mountain that looked a little bit more like a pyramid right next to the community pool. There was a restaurant that had revolving doors, a tree house, and yes, Santa and a snowman inside.
With the belief that the sky is not the limit, our city grew and grew to the point that it was difficult to find places to walk on the playroom floor. It came alive when we fueled the imagination that felt endless inside of us.
I spent hours on end sorting through buckets of Lego bricks, carefully choosing each piece and considering the possibilities of what they could be. I examined them closely, viewing them as if for the first time so I could make connections and put them together in ways that were maybe not the obvious solutions. This perspective of wonder is unexpected, inexplicable at times, but beautiful.
I built new worlds and made up countless stories within them. Stories were all around me as a child. We read them, watched them and heard them told to us. It’s no wonder that for me, play has always involved some sort of story. In this new city we built, we wondered what the life of each Lego man was like.
What were they talking about? Sitting around the table at the restaurant? Why was one in jail? How did the horse end up at the pool? As silly as they might have been, those stories informed how we created each part of the city.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was designing. Since then, I lived a little bit more of life and learned a lot more about myself and design, which leads me to the other category of ideas that make up my design philosophy.
The ideas I established after being stretched in my understanding of what design is and what I believe it can do.
Design transforms doubt into possibility. When left to my own devices, my instinct is to fear the what if, and to be anxious over all the ways that something could go wrong, or the reasons that it shouldn’t be able to work.
I see in the way that the process of bringing an idea to life through creating encourages me to push through these limiting thoughts and transform them into perspectives that generate new possibilities. I’ve learned how to dance with the fear that used to stop me from moving forward.
Instead of responding with “I can’t because…” my answer gets to be, “But what if it could?” through design. Fear has been a constant battle for me in my creative process, but design gives me a way to challenge fear and pursue a creativity that is rooted in possibility.
Design is both and not either or. For me, design is a place where things that seemingly shouldn’t go together are able to work in tandem.
It’s both logic and wonder, problem-solving and possibility-generating, meticulous and messy, careful consideration and play, thoughtful and an escape from my thoughts, imagination and practical solutions. Designing a space where these things can intersect instead of conflict. I find myself living and creating in the beautiful contradiction that is the both/and of design.
Design fosters gratitude. The combination of big picture thinking and a detail-oriented approach used throughout my design process is what invites me to gratitude.
A constant state of zooming in and zooming out allows me to embrace gratitude for what is, for what could be, for the bigger picture, and for the up close. With design, I am more in tune to the beauty that’s all around and the fact that there’s always something to be appreciated. When there are a lot of things about creating that can feel complicated, I stand firm in the belief that design encourages and sometimes feels like it begs for a simple, honest pursuit of the position of gratitude.
Design is optimistic. The opportunity that design opens for a problem to be solved, constraints moved, people change for the better, and more beauty materialized in the world, points me to the fact that design is inherently optimistic.
It actively engages with a hope and a belief that there’s good to be found and created. I’ve learned that my design and ultimately I am better when I’m working with the understanding that a positive outcome is always right around the corner.
Design is worship. With each step I take with my growth as a designer, I become more convinced that design is a sacred process for the deeply rooted purpose, not because of how good an important design is, but because I have experience God, my favorite creator, being present in the process with me, leading me to use design for him in His glory, for worship.
Design is a vessel for the Gospel.
While design produces a lot of good in my life, it is so much bigger and more important than that. It means people’s needs, solves their problems, and has the power to make the world a better place. It’s love in a tangible way. It’s service.
Using design in this way comes from an overflow of being changed by the love of Jesus and wanting to bring that to other people.
In design, I have tools to carry a love to people who are touched by the tangible things that I put into the world. What an honor, what responsibility.
Design is a way to bring the Kingdom of God to Earth. While I can never encompass all that God’s kingdom is, I believe that design is a powerful way to bring glimpses of God’s kingdom to earth, making it a more beautiful place.
I see pieces of heaven in design. It’s an exhilarating, humbling, and sometimes perplexing responsibility that I get to hold: making beautiful things that reflect qualities bigger than themselves and bigger than me, bringing light and delight to the world around me.
So in a lot of ways, I’ve never let go of designing like I’m building a Lego city. I design with play, curiosity, imagination, wonder, and storytelling.
Those perspectives, attitudes, and intentions have been within me all along. Only now my Lego cities have a more solid foundation and understanding to rest upon: a foundation of possibility, of both/and, of gratitude, and of optimism. They’re no longer built on playroom floors, but on holy ground.
Thank you.
Senior Symposia
Senior Symposia is an annual event for the Department of Art+Design in the South Carolina School of the Arts at Anderson University (SC) where BFA Graphic Design Seniors present personal Design Philosophies, synthesizing and summarizing their experiences and perspectives over the course the program. These presentations act as markers in their developmental journey, bringing to light what they believe to be true about design, what design can do, and what they hope to do through design.
