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

Crossover Nordic – Day 2 (Part 2)

There’s been ALOT of pitching today and its now 4.30 pm and we’re preparing for another set of pitches from the team.  There should be about 20 more which will get the idea wall full of about the 50 that we need for tomorrow’s ideas market.

Earlier today, the teams built up personas – stories about the lives of a typical users/consumer of the content and service they want to make.  After building up a ‘world view’ for this fictional person, they introduced the persona and pitched an idea that was made for that person.

One of the personas - Fredrik, 25yo

The quality of the pitching has been great – right from the start, I’ve been impressed.  Its not easy to bare your thoughts to a group of strangers and the confidence, courage and honesty (nevermind English-speaking skills!) have been impressive.

Pitching is a key part of Crossover – its a great way for testing an idea and getting feedback.  To recap, we’ve had pitches that started with:

• Stories and topics
• Platforms
• Personas

The final pitches can be anything that the participants want – some will be from ideas they’ve had brewing in

Another persona - Kajsa, 37 yo

their heads or jobs outside of Crossover and some will be from ideas they’ve had here.  The key to these pitches is that they will use the ‘NABC’ method of pitching.

NABC is the name of a method of pitching that requires users to quickly outline:

• The Need that their production will serve (be it an audience or business need);
• The Approach they propose for meeting the need;
• The Benefits of their chosen approach for meeting the need and;
• The Competition their idea will meet in the market place.

This methodology was developed by SRI (who are leaders in the field of product design and innovation).  IDEO are another leader in this area who’s methodology are also worth checking out – their method cards are a well-known tool for facilitators.

To make sure the Ideas Wall is full for tomorrow, there’s going to be one more idea-generation exercise: using random photos as stimulus to create a starting point, working the starting point through a genre and then working that into a short pitch for the morning.

Tonight we’ll be hearing the ‘Slussen Stories’ – the ones the teams started on the first night with objects from the island (Slussen) with stimulus that they had to digitise.