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It's not like it used to be (I feel old)May 18 '02 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Lego used to be about creativity. It still is. But it is very easy to just make what you see on the box these days without any creativity whatsoever.
After writing reviews of vacuum cleaners in the style of Paul Harvey, and trying to be witty in my put-down of the George Forman Grill, I decided that perhaps I should stick to what I do best - writing an honest, from the heart view of the items that matter most to me. Lego is one of them. I'm sure that my opinions will cause some people to nod their head and others will complain at me as if I am some old idealist who is out of touch with the youth of today. Anyway, whatever your thoughts are (and I'd be interested in knowing them - please leave comments), these are my feelings on the Lego of today, the Lego of yesterday and the future of Lego for generations to come. By the time I was old enough to play with Lego without eating it (at the age of 25, my mother might still claim that I am not safe with it), Lego had come out with Lego technic. By the time I grew out of Lego, there were at most 6 different styles of lego - A little bit of space Lego, train Lego, Lego technic, boat Lego and every day red brick Lego. I look at Lego today and I see : Harry Potter Lego, Star Wars Lego, Escape to Mars Lego, Lego Mindstorms, ... the list goes on and on. While it is exciting to see how much this product has taken off and how it is able to keep kids interested by offering product tie-ins, I have to feel a little bit disappointed. Why? Because, when I was a young lad - the boxes of lego that you bought had very run-of-the-mill designs inside. The designs were there to give you a helping hand in building something, but they certainly were never intended to be the finished product. There was always the unwritten assumption that you were going to combine the pieces from your model car kit, with the pieces from your spacecraft kit and make a spaceship that could race on racetracks... or a moon buggy... something different from the original design. Lego Technic was great for this - you just got a load of cogs and gears, rods and motors and just built a mechanism. You had no idea what it was going to do until you finished building it. When it was half complete, I would think to myself "hey, this would make a really cool motorized back scratcher" or "if I gear this up, it can go really fast" or occasionally "if I attach this to it, I can use it as a weapon to attack my brothers and sister with". (OK I admit, it was more than the occasional battle in my house that was fought using Lego as the tool of destruction). And all of this was at the age of 8 or 9. If I needed to make landing gear for my spaceship, I had to make do with the pieces I had - usually a flat piece attached to some support rods. In my imagination it was a landing gear. But now I believe it is a real challenge to encourage that same kind of creativity with Lego. If you need a landing gear, you buy the Lego X-wing fighter and steal the landing gear off that. In fact if you need a spaceship at all, you might as well just take the whole Lego x-wing and go with that. Don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of opportunities to be creative (or to allow your child to be creative), but the emphasis today seems far more on the finished product than the creative process of reaching it. Spaceships today seem to be created by connecting the spaceship base (step 1) to the spaceship roof (step 2) and adding wings and a pilot (steps 3 and 4). I have to admit, I had friends who as kids would still not see past the original design of their lego products - they had each item carefully displayed on their bookcase - a perfect replica of the image on the box. These friends also had immaculate bedrooms - something I never had. If I were to ask my mother to review lego, I am sure she would say "Lego encourages creativity, but not tidiness". If you want my opinion, the best place to store lego is on the bedroom floor - use the whole of the space, just dump all the bits around you and play in it like someone would in one of those ball pools. I learned a lot about "categorization" through my parents attempts to get me to clear everything up at the end of the week into small storage bins. Even today I still feel the need to put all of the red pieces of paper in one file, the different shaped red pieces of paper into another file - and have a file for "one of a kind items"... like the Lego motor power box. I was a member of the Lego club, and in their monthly magazine they would have pictures sent in by "master builders" of cool lego items that they had built... usually a working replica of the eiffel tower or their parents car. I was always jealous of them because they had access to just the right number of each colored piece. I would be lucky if I could keep the red motif of my spaceship going past the nosecone and cockpit. I invariably ended up with a rainbow colored spaceship which would receive no Lego club accolades (I don't think they even sent me a "thank you for your submission" card). Anyway, such experiences of disappointment prepared me well for my current task of getting papers published in academic journals (or failure thereof). I believe I can safely say that most of the skills that I use on a daily basis I learned from Lego. I just hope that the same holds true for future generations. If you are a parent thinking about buying your kid lego - buy her the star wars lego (it's cool), buy her the harry potter lego (she's probably pestering you for it), but then insist that they try making something other than the object on the box. And if they don't want to do that? Just go out, buy yourself the Lego Mindstorms package, and play with it yourself!  |
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