Thinking with Legos… and your hands

Last Monday we explored collaborating, and prototyping, with Legos.

We started by discussing failure (and building what failure meant to us). While several participants stressed the negative aspects (missing a goal, frustration, feeling stuck, anxiety, disappointment of the self and of others, social pressure, etc.), we also found that failure could be reframed as a learning opportunity. For instance, Charly reminded us that emotions were not intrinsically negative: if we were able to redefine negative emotions as perceived emotions, we might be able to get “unstuck”. Others like Jonathan and Marielen stressed the value of hearing from others’ “failures” and see that we are not alone, and that there is an “after”. In the context of prototyping, reframing failure is particularly important in order to learn from the feedback and be able to iterate.

Legos for prototyping and collaborating

We explored how to use legos for ideation, prototyping and collaboration. We did a series of additive exercises, and in the last activity, a constraint was added: teams could not talk. At the end the teams had a couple of minutes to come up with a story for their final construction. The variety of stories was impressive!

Beyond the fun of playing with Legos (which continued after we were done with the activities), we learnt a number of things through the exercise:

Nurturing creativity through playfulness

Lego reminds us of our childhood, freeing us of a number of constraints and allowing us to explore more and nurture our creative confidence. Legos are also great because they support playful behaviors that have been shown to be crucial to creativity. They lower the barriers to start having wild (even stupid) ideas.

At the same time, Legos as a constraint can become generative: the material becomes a source of inspiration. Legos as building blocks provide some constraints, which in turn free up creativity. There is less worry than with a sketching exercise.

Quick and dirty prototyping:

Legos allow us to think with our hands and to prototype very quickly:

It’s easy to take them apart and start again. The fear of failing in close to zero. In that sense, it’s different to the second and third phase of last week’s prototyping activity.

Boundary object that facilitates collaboration:

It becomes easy to collaborate as we can work on our own stuff and bring them together (modular) or add things at the same time (multi-hands collaboration). Each person can add up something. And there is some transparency that helps trust and collaboration: you can see what the others are doing “in real time” and taking it apart or putting it back together is easy.

Legos as triggering social bounding: new teams were formed but very quickly people felt comfortable working together.

Building upon and ambiguity

The additive nature of the activities made it sometimes difficult to move to the next activity, because of the ambiguity of the task (no one knew where they were going; it was just a series of activities) and because each new activity involved letting go — at least partially — of what you had previously built (we get quickly attached to what we’ve built!).

But there was also generative in the possibility of building upon previous ideas: Iteration in action!

The power of story telling

All teams came up with a radically, but very innovative, story. This illustrated the power of story telling: how Legos inspired storytelling but also how we need a narrative to help make sense of an idea. This is something to keep in mind as you start planning for your final presentation. Imagine if you have had to go and to come up with a story for another team’s construction.

From the readings:

Legos are a great illustration of psychological theories of learning (Piaget’s constructionism and Papert’s constructivism — see The Lego Serious play paper) which highlight the importance of situated and embodied cognition in development, learning and problem solving.

Paper pushed Piaget’s theory (i.e. material learning is an important phase leading to abstraction) one step further and argued that concrete thinking is a mode of thinking (rather than a phase).

In teams and organizations:

• How to use Lego for brainstorming and team building: Legos are great tools for team building but also for brainstorming for all the reasons noted above. They are easier to use than sketching as no one can claim that they can’t build something with Legos.
• People giggle and think it’s just a childish activity but this also allows them to try things and take risks. (See Lego Serious Play post here).
• They are also great tools for collaboration with users and clients (remember the workshop organized by Engine Service Design — see case).
• They are great to represent a journey and suggest an experience.

Questions to keep in mind:
- How could you use Legos in your project for this class or another class?
-How to use Legos to prototype: in a workshop with users? In a video? As a storytelling exercise?