Legos

This quarter I am enrolled in a Design Minor class. I did not expect much from this class having experienced the major classes, but this class has proven to teach me more than I expected. I would like to share with you a paper I wrote as a journal. I found it to be very powerful.


Beginning to read the assigned chapter, I immediately found gratification in the use of one five-letter word: legos. Immediately, Tim Brown launched into the conversation of playing with these brightly colored bricks to create dinosaurs, planes, cars, houses, buildings and robots and prototyping at such a young age. I admit, it is fascinating and eerie to think that at such a young age we are innovators, inventors, creators who build on the world of imagination, with minimal knowledge of physics and limitations. The only limitation is the number of blocks I have in my hands. I find it funny how we invest most of our time, effort and money on one branch of our interlocking web of brainstorming, when the best innovators and the most successful ideas come from children who do not know what the word innovate even means. Honestly, there’s a shred of jealousy and pride in my emotions in regards to this idea. Genius lives in the mind of a toddler, and is much more of a rare occurrence to myself, a 21-year old adult. There must be something irregular about our education process if after education and college, we contain less genius than we did 20 years ago. Or here’s a thought… what if it’s not our academic system but our social system that leads to the demise of genius? Are we so inclined to fit in our society that we let go our imaginative ideas and forget about daydreaming and building robots? Here’s a crazy idea, let’s have the children create the ideas, and we, the willing and able adults create the prototypes and continue the process with the aid and imagination of a toddler.
“Anything tangible that lets us explore an idea, evaluate it, and push it forward is a prototype. I have seen sophisticated insulin injection deices that began life as legos. I have seen software interfaces mocked up with post-it notes long before a line of code was written.” The more I think about it, some of the most aesthetically pleasing objects are ones that are imaginative, simple, fundamental and elementary. I included an image of insulin pumps on my first project on innovation. They are attractive because there is something elementary and almost childish about the idea. Ipods are the same way, they are colorful and simple with only four buttons. And in these simple objects that are successful, we can see the lego mock-ups, or the post-it layouts. The winning designs allow us to think simply, with the mind of a child, or even take our minds back to the time when we were once all geniuses. Apple designs are a good example, my mother who has trouble reading her email can work an ipod. Why? Because it’s so simple, a child could use it. I think this is the idea here, simplicity, but not aesthetic simplicity but simplicity of the product itself. We can forget being adults, forget about paying the bills, or balancing checkbooks, or writing an essay, we allow the product to take us to another place and time. The more I think about it, the more I wish I could be a kid again, and forget about GPAs and exams, where is the fun we used to have? I may be completely wrong, but I do believe we are created as humans who are innately genius, we are visionaries from birth, but society molds and shapes us to fit with the cookie-cutter standard, and we come to lose our whimsy as time passes. I think it’s important to remember who we are, and in this sense, we are all designers, we are all inventors of lego robots, engineers of spaceships, masterminds of genetic manipulation, we make what we want to make and we live the uninhibited life. “This shift from physical to abstract and back again is one of the most fundamental processes by which we explore the universe, unlock our imaginations, and open our minds to new possibilities.”

The next one will be about Disney.