Lego.
While writing this, I can spot Lego bricks all around our home. A NexoNights minifigure is hiding under the sofa. It’s disturbingly staring at me, with a frozen grin on its face.
Lego is a brand name, but at the same time it describes the whole category of similar items. They are not just toys but an ultimate tool for play.
Paula Scher, a famous graphic designer and partner in Pentagram, talks about design and play in her Ted Talk. She states that great design is solemn, not serious. According to her, the definition of play is engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor. Also gambling. I think the nature of play is very similar to design. Every project is a leap into unknown and previously unexplored, with no guarantee of success. The process of finding the solution is a play — at its best.
Scher recalls an old essay from Russell Baker, who used to write an “Observer” column in the New York Times. He writes about the paradox of being solemn — and serious; “Be serious. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That’s because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious.”
It’s worth noting that neither will guarantee the quality, not a serious or solemn approach. Sometimes being solemn is the right approach. But being serious is something very different by its essence. It’s spontaneous, intuitive, accidental. As Scher puts it: “mostly, it’s achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don’t really make any sense.” Children are serious with their play. When it becomes solemn, the play stops.
Imagination and creativity.
Back to Lego. Sondra Bacharach, the associate Professor of Philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, reminds us how Lego Group as a company is “well aware of the bricks’ role as a universal tool for the imagination.” I recall one of the Lego Group’s most successful advertisement campaigns a few years back that carried a minimal tagline: “Imagine.” Campaign created by Jun Von Matt features favorite cartoon characters such as The Simpsons and The Smurfs in an abstract pixel style.
The idea behind this campaign makes me question if imagination is limited by what you can build. I believe not, because imagination can’t always be materialized. Take music or dance performance, for instance. A such multisensory experience can be emotionally charged. It can contain interwoven meanings and intertextuality, layers that you discover similarly as by peeling onion layer by layer. I wonder, could similar be built with Legos?
Perhaps language is the limiting factor here. An aesthetic experience always returns back to words, but expression goes beyond explanation. Similarly, play is multifaceted and can emerge in different forms. For Lego, it’s building things.
However, the way Lego Group associates imagination with play is incisive. Imagination in its essence permits to play without pragmatic or purposeful intent. It’s a possibility in its own world with a limitless contingent.
What’s the difference between imagination and creativity, then? Ann Pendleton-Julian and John Seely Brown describe in their book ‘Pragmatic Imagination: Single from Design Unbound’: “Creative activity aims to do something purposeful. The imagination is something that emerges. While creativity works towards products that exist in the real world and have a real-world purpose, the product of the imagination is the “imagined object”; it is the image itself.”
I’ve noticed that adults often lack creative confidence. There’s a common but false belief that only some people are creative. In their book ‘Creative confidence,’ Tom and David Kelley write about Frank Gehry. He is one of the greatest architects in history, a mastermind behind the iconic Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Early in his career, Gehry had a job washing airplanes in a small airport in Southern California. He liked it, and even though it was a simple job, he might have stayed if someone would just teach him to fly. Little did the manager of that aviation company know he had one of the most creative architects of the past hundred years washing planes for him. Can you imagine that? What a creative potential, just waiting to be unleashed.
In my experience, people declaring not to be creative are actually incredibly resourceful. The ability to innovate and produce creative solutions is paramount, both from a human self-actualization point of view but also economically. Creativity is to think like a traveler in a foreign city. It’s maintaining the beginner’s mindset. Lego taps into the explorer instinct and is why it still holds relevant after 90 years.
Brick by brick.
Lego bricks are not only for children. Adults increasingly build Lego to practice mindfulness. I’ve used Lego as a tool for creating physical models of the design concepts.
To my experience, sometimes abstract concepts are easier to grasp when put into pieces — bricks. Selling design consultation services is a good example. The challenge is to convince the client to commit to you and your capabilities to deliver a solid outcome to an abstract problem statement. Agencies break the process into roles, skills, workflows, diagrams, modules, frameworks, proof points. These bricks translate into a currency and premise of a successful project.
While high-end product brands like Gucci, Panerai or B&O hardly ever present such process flows. For them, the end result matters. After two decades in the design business, my internalization is that the process never repeats itself. It is hypothetical to formalize it to a universal model or set of building blocks. Another version of a double-diamond doesn’t automatically guarantee the desired outcome.
As Jay-Z puts it: “Be fluid. Treat each project differently. Be water, man. The best style is no style. Because styles can be figured out. And when you have no style they can’t figure you out.”
Natasha Jen, a graphic designer and partner from Pentagram, criticizes the design industry of its methods: “Design is not a monster you ‘unleash’ to fix the world.” She claims that simplistic flow diagrams and sticky note brainstorm sessions, the concept of “design thinking”, undermines design. “When you only use one little square — a sticky note — as your outlet, that’s a big problem. Design needs to use lots of research, photos, images and more to build a more holistic understanding about anything.” And I agree with her. Synthesizing the inventory of sticky notes exercise is not where the value is added, it’s the point where value adding ought to start.
Find your flow.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant talks about a condition called languishing. He describes it as follows: ”…last year… I was staying up way past midnight, doomscrolling, playing endless games of online Scrabble and bingeing entire seasons of TV shows that weren’t even good. The next morning I’d wake up in a daze and swear, ”Tonight in bed by 10:00.” But it kept happening night after night for weeks.” Languishing is a feeling of emptiness and stagnation. I’ve been stuck there during the past months. However, according to Grant, languishing is not unique to a pandemic. It’s part of the human condition.
Two decades of research demonstrates that languishing disrupts focus and lowers motivation. It can also lead to depression because languishing often lurks below the surface. You might not even realize that.
According to Grant, researchers discovered in the early days of the pandemic, that optimism was not the best predictor of well-being. It was flow. ”Flow is that feeling of being in the zone, cooked by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. It’s that state of total absorption in an activity. For you, it might be cooking or running or gardening where you lose track of time and you might even lose your sense of self.” Lego bricks are tools taking children to that journey. Also for adults, Lego has an inspirational section on their website encouraging you to ‘find your flow.’ You now know where to start.
Reflection
“There’s evidence that on average, people are checking emails 74 times a day, switching tasks every 10 minutes, and that creates what’s been called time confetti, where we take what could be meaningful moments of our lives and we shred them into increasingly tiny, useless pieces.” (Adam Grant) Slots in Outlook calendar are the manifestation of the tiny pieces. My stagnation during the past few months is a paradoxical. While nothing is exactly wrong, everything is not completely fine either. I imagine of getting rid of the timeline and dream of free flow. Then I lean back, breathe in and continue. “Let it come. Let it go. Let it flow.” (Anonymous)
