Lego, Imagination and Work

Last week I was lucky enough to go on a session about using Lego as a means of facilitating creativity and/or strategy.  It wasn’t the full ‘Lego Serious Play‘ experience – but it piqued my curiosity in this and was interesting so I thought I’d share – and share some fun photos I took of the serious play we were enganged in. Serious Play is a technique that Lego have developed for using their bricks, etc in the office for, erm, work.

The session I went to was run by the Digital Research Unit based in Huddersfield.

The idea is that using the bricks can help people use their imaginations and using the bricks to express complex ideas and relationships in 3D, describe complicated relationships and also give you a chance to use your hands (which, in theory, helps some people engage their brains more).  They can also be used in brainstorming – and many of you saw an example of how this can be done in an exercise one of my colleagues ran a  few months ago.

We worked through a process where we used the Lego to model our own role; then how we operate within that role; the wider organisation etc, until we built up a large model of how our roles fit together and fit into the BBC.  We also built aspects of ourself that we don’t bring to work and used these to do some introspection into how we might (or might not) change the way we operated, etc.

The main idea was to get people to work through their individual identity, then team identity and then the wider environment/landscape their role and organisation exists in.

My role - in Lego!

How I operate in my role - In Lego!

A 'model' BBC

I was really captivated by how much the Lego opened up the conversations we were having.  ‘Playing’ allowed us to put alot of our normal conversational conventions to the side and forced us to explain things in a simple way that wasn’t offensive or overly formal because we were using simple tools for explaining our ideas.  I also thought about people I work with who aren’t necessarily comfortable expressing themselves verybally who could use this as a means of showing instead of speaking.  And, best of all, building something before you explain it makes you think before you speak; and let’s face it, we could all do more of this.

Effectively we were building stories.  Stories about who we are, where we work and how we do it.  But this storytelling could be expanded to help build stories for use in programme making or other content.  I recently read an article in Wallpaper* (which unfortunately isn’t online) about how architects are building stories and fantasy into some of the new work that’s being done in that field because they’re trying to embrace our contemporary need for more narrative experiences that blur the difference between real and fantastic.

I think this is especially important when you work with digital media – sure everything needs to be functional and simple – but it should also delight and building this delight is the hardest part.  Sure Google search is a wonderful piece of technology, but it latched into not being ‘just another search box’ by having fun and playing with its logo.  I’d hope that in the type of work that I do, that if we start by expressing our ideas with Lego (or other manual tools for that matter) that we might capture some of the fun and fantasy that can get lost along the way.

We’ll see how it goes.  I’ve just installed a few containers full of Lego in meeting spaces for my team to ‘play’ with…

Some more info on Lego in the office/work environment:

http://www.seriousplay.com/

http://www.artlab.org.uk/lego.htm

http://kn.theiet.org/magazine/issues/0903/lego-for-life-0903.cfm

http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/Tasmania_dest/Default.aspx

All The News That’s Fit to Print (in a Tweet)

Here’s a great little (no pun intended) experiment that I think is really cool. All the day’s news – in one Tweet.

http://twitter.com/tinynews

The tweet takes you from “tinynews” to a site with (only slightly longer) “fullernews” and makes for interesting, if brief, reading. Check it.

MIPTV Keynotes: It’s all about mobile and TV will not die

I’m at MIPTV in Cannes and am incredibly impressed – almost shocked – at just how important many of the keynote speakers are saying mobile is.  It’s amazing and great to hear some of the real big shots in the media carrying on about the space I’m working in – and it feels a little like 10 years ago when the industry really started taking the web seriously.  So brace yourselves folks, I think this is yet another sign of alot of excitement to come.

The other good news was that while all the speeches I saw predicted a tough time ahead for TV, they predicted a bright future.  Now, they would say that at a TV industry conference, wouldn’t they?  But, there was some serious data and thought behind the predictions and again, mobile played a big role in their thinking.

Here’s what I took away from some of the keynotes:

Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP Group

TV will not die – network tv will still be effective for reaching large numbers quickly and cheaply.  But, he predicted, it won’t have the same dominance.  Sir Martin predicts the balance of advertising spend will redistribute itself like this:  20-25%, Newsapper 20-25%, Other 20-25% and New media around 25%.  He predicted that an increase in mobile would make up a good part of the increasing spend in new media areas.

PC video and mobile content – especially mobile in B R I C s (his term for the Brazil, Russia, India and China markets) – would be especially important since this is where mobile can give cheap access to those who are not yet connected.  He pointed out the significance of China Mobile having 450m subscribers out of a total 650m mobile subscriptions in China to emphasize this.

The ability for mobiles to become a distribution and consumption platform for TV/video content is what makes them important in combination and why it’s likely they’ll survive the tough times and come out stronger than before.

This sentiment was echod in the next keynote I attended.  (Official/full MIP blog post on the session here.)

Jeffrey Cole, PhD – Director USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future

Jeffrey’s speech backed up Sir Martin’s predictions with some serious academic data that the Center for the Digital Future has been collecting for years.

His basic premise was that ‘all media survives.’  Media never get completely wiped out – they just change and often thier market dominance becomes smaller.  He cited that radio was not wiped out by TV and (in America at least) is still a vibrant business, though not as huge as it once was.  He predicted similar fates for music, film and newspapers (scarily he predicted there will only be 3 or 4 newspapers in America after the next few years).

TV is the exception, he said – “Rather than shrinking, television (video) will grow dramatically in importance.”  People will watch TV on a small screen – including long form and series.  TV is our constant companion and follows behaviour of people turning to their mobiles when they’re bored.  This lines up with the way we’ve seen people using Mobile BBC iPlayer in my work.  The myth that people will only watch tiny clips of short-form videos on phones disappears once you give them a means of easily accessing and consuming full length content.  (Official/full post here.)

Niklas Savander from Nokia also echoed similar sentiments in his keynote; but this was mainly with the aim of promoting the long-talked-about Ovi store.  Which sounded like a completely different Ovi to the one that Nokia were talking about here last year which was all about sharing media created on phones.  Strange.

Video of Niklas:

I’ll be writing about some more highlights from the conference soon.