Lego and Adaptive Design
Creative types (artists, designers, programmers) often proudly state that their favourite toy as kids was Lego, as it allowed them to build something without any restrictions and nurtured their imagination. Now there are huge adult hobbyist and hacker communities based around building crazy things with Lego.
The nature of Lego has always been geared towards adaptability - you are literally provided with the building blocks, and allowed to create anything you want. It’s probably the most open-ended toy you can buy. (Some newer lego box sets provide you with the pieces and instructions to create an exact replica of what’s on the box - boo to that!)
I guess the people at Lego appreciate the fact that a lot of their customers are basically hackers; when their 3D digital Lego designer software was modified by fans recently, they encouraged the development, even though the changes to the software allowed users to order only the bricks they needed for their own designs, as opposed to predefined collections.
All it took was being open-minded enough to see that their biggest fans weren’t trying to rip them off; they were trying to improve Lego’s products in a way that, just maybe, the company’s own designers hadn’t thought of.
A couple of years ago when Mindstorms, Lego’s electronic and robotics kits, was being hacked by home users, they opened up the propriatary programming source code, and spawned a whole community, which in turn improved the product.
This is a pretty adaptive design-friendly approach to running a business, and it’s cool to see Lego still empowering their fans to use their toys in the way they want by remaining true to their product’s values.
Anyway, all of this popped into my head when John showed me an animation he’d made for his presentation at TechCamp this weekend. He used LDRAW, a Lego digital modelling program, to create a storyboard explaining the Semantic Web using little Lego men in an office scenario. Step aside, Powerpoint.
What is it about those bright little bricks that brings out the hacker in people?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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October 11th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
And luckily I still have my Lego in the attic so maybe I can build the animation too :)
October 12th, 2005 at 12:21 am
Ha HA! Another post a non-hacker/developer loved! Lego isn’t just a hacker’s toy, but the very basis of Democritus’ philosophical standpoint (which, at roughly 2500 years old, is a bit out of date, but still pretty spot on.)
“Why is Lego the most ingenious toy in the world?
This is a question in the book Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder. And the answer is that:
Each block is indivisible.
Each block is solid, impermeable and un-cuttable.*
They have different shapes and sizes.
They have ‘hooks’ and ‘barbs’ so that they can be connected to form every conceivable figure. These connections can later be broken again so that new figures can be constructed from the same blocks.
They are ‘eternal’ in that children of today can play with the same blocks that their parents did when they were young.
The reason that these features are so special is that these are all properties that the philosopher Democritus ascribed to atoms. They mimic atoms, the tiny invisible building blocks of life, in that they are eternal (because nothing can come from nothing), but that they are not all the same. Which is why atoms can make everything from daisies to horses to fingernails, and why Lego can make everything from castles to spaceships to island shacks for pirates.”
Stick that in your digital pipe and make an eggplant out of it!
October 12th, 2005 at 1:53 am
lego… many a happy rainy saturday morning memory from 1980’s ireland.
i can still remember how it hurt like fuck when i accidently knelt on a block.
November 13th, 2008 at 3:26 am
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