Image credit: scilit/Flickr
Call it nostalgia or a refusal to grow up, but lately I’ve been thinking about the progression of children’s toys—specifically, LEGO. When I was a kid, LEGOs were simple bricks to be assembled into something greater. Sure there were wheels you could add to make a car; but for the most part, LEGOs were a blank canvas. The most basic of toys, it let imaginations run wild. Today, they come pre-fab—you have no choice but to assemble these bricks into a robot, a carousel, a village, etc. Where is the imagination in that?
As I prepare to enter my first year as a Media Design graduate student, I’ve also been thinking about the vast topic of technology. Is emerging technology the new LEGO? Has technology advanced so much that it has put the designer into a creative box? Sure we are able to do incredible things with technology. I don’t want to sound ungrateful to live in this age of extraordinary innovation. But I have to wonder, is it zapping our imagination? Are we just cutting and pasting based on other people’s inventions? If so, can we really bring true originality to our work?
Turning back Time is not an option (until we invent something that does!). We, as designers, are more challenged than ever to be inventive and memorable in this time of constant change and upgrade. Challenge? Definitely. Opportunity? Absolutely.
4 Comments
Sara–you’ve cast a spotlight nicely on a specific instance of a toy line “devolving” to grow sales and market share. Do you think this was an inevitable step for LEGO or just a function of marketing driving product development? I look forward to hearing how you address this broader issue of technology and innovation in your studies.
Re: LEGO have often thought the same, however, the other day that all changed when our kids put all those pre-fabs in onebox, mixed them about, and picked out pieces at random and started to make the some intriguing models from combining plants, dinosaur teeth, Harry Potter webs, Knight’s shields and Ferrari tyres. My five year old daughter made a ‘car’ powered by, according to her, tree branches…..sure it’s still cut and paste but with a bit of imagination (freedom and creativity) we can still bring true originality to our work.
Challenge? Definitely. Opportunity? Absolutely.
great post! to add a tiny tidbit to this – i just read an article about legos in i believe MAKE magazine.. apparently lego blocks themselves have not changed in size since they were invented – they manufacture the current legos to match perfectly with the O.G. legos of yesteryear and you can snap them all together.. pretty cool
Excellent topic. My two cents. I’m an engineering minded person and now in the creative industry. I’m here to say that Lego was the only toy I played with on a daily basis as a kid. They taught me how to draw… yes draw in a way where I would plan out what I was aiming to build (say an Imperial Walker that I had just seen in the Empire Strikes Back movie), then organize the right pieces, and then start to strategize on the assembly. But what Lego did get me to do also that helps with my creative mind today is to tear things apart, restrategize and make them better. Either functionally or artistically. Once I had the functions working, I would then disassemble and then reassemble with a better “look”. Now, if I had the Brick Builder software and the Mindstorms robotic software that they have now, sheesh, I think there’s no limit to what I might have done back then. But naturally, I could prbably only plan and build what ever my parents could AFFORD me to plan and build, of course. Ha!
Also don’t forget gang that Lego has many more sophisticated pieces now that creates a whole different level of creative thinking rather than the limited number of blocks they had back in the 70s when I grew up. My friends and I were always begging for pieces that we needed for what we wanted to build back then that we didn’t have, and now, I see, they do.
Creativity to me, especially now in this digital world, is only limited by one’s capacity and willingness to make change.