Everything I ever needed to know I learned from playing with Lego.
I don’t remember exactly when I started playing with the little Danish building blocks known as Lego but I do remember spending hours playing with it during grade school. I’m pretty sure that the first Lego set I ever had was given to me by my parents for Christmas. I can picture the box it came in. It had a cardboard lid that hinged up to reveal the blister pack beneath filled with sorted bricks. At the end of the 8th grade I had amassed several baskets full of bricks from all sorts of building sets. Lego was just starting to get into its new philosophy of releasing specialized playsets that encompassed themes like pirates and knights. That’s when it started losing its appeal to me. The bricks were too specialized. A “brick” shaped like a treasure chest isn’t very useful when you wanted to build a very tall tower. It was more like Playmobil than Lego at that point. Still, the years I spent playing with Danegeld taught me a lot of what I know to be true today. Lego trained me in design, programming, possibility, feasibility, conservation, organization, symmetry, efficiency, and self learning.
It taught me my sense of design. My style of design is modular, symmetrical, geometric. Look at my webpage. you can see where the bricks have been placed. Everything has been placed into a box. I guess that’s why I haven’t been able to make the switch to CSS. I understand rows, columns, tables more than I do layers.
It taught me about programming. I played with Lego before my first LOGO class. Programming is a lot like Lego: Each brick is like a data statement or an object. Once they’re assembled, you have a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts. But Lego also taught me how to build in order. You have to lay down a foundation before you can build up. And a lot of design goes into the foundation. You have to visualize it, lay it all out before hand. It’s akin to laying out your data structures and classes. Finally, the last thing you add are the minifigs and scenery; the UI. So I guess I learned that form follows function. Of course ,it taught me about modular design of programs. You could build a chassis and then build several different cars from it. Some of my car chassis designs I used over and over again, just reconfiguring the wheels and body to make a jeep, dune buggy, or tank.
I’ve understood from an early age that no matter how long I stared at that pile of bricks on my floor they wouldn’t and couldn’t spontaneously order themselves into a car. The only way they could go from a chaotic to an ordered state is if I ordered them. The universe’s natural state is chaos and entropy. Even if I put all the bricks in a basket and shook the basket up, the odds of two bricks connecting by themselves was zero. Not near zero. Not virtually zero. Zero. And once you built a car, you’d always refine it. You could add things, take things away. Make it faster, lighter, smaller, better. But I was the one doing it. There was always an intelligence guiding it.
It taught me limits. There’s only so high you can build a tower no matter how many bricks you have. There are other forces fighting you like gravity and the height of your bedroom ceiling. Design and materials could only take you so far. Soon the stress on the bricks would be too great. They couldn’t hold together no matter how hard you pressed them together or how much string you used to tie it to the ceiling. The tower would buckle from the middle instead. I learned that there’s no sense starting a project if you don’t have the right number or kinds of bricks to complete it: You’ve got be realistic.
I remember going to other kid’s homes and seeing the state of their bricks and collections. They were always sticky, broken and missing bricks. To this day, I still put everything away. Always take care of your gear if you want it to take care of you.
The hardest part about building with Lego is finding the brick you want when you want it. You can see it in your mind. You can describe it. You just can’t find it. You need to sort your bricks. I used to play with Lego with my sisters so we developed our own taxonomy. I need a flat yellow 1. I need a fat red 2. Once you’ve learned to name things, to sort them it’s easy to group them together. If you need to find something you need to keep organized.
Were you the type of kid who mixed bricks and colors or the kid who used only one color? I much preferred to build in one colour but I usually didn’t have enough bricks of any one colour to always be able to do that. Instead I quickly learned that mixing colours but building with symmetry was just as pleasing. I seem to remember something about this in Coupland's Microserfs but danged if I can find it now. You'd think he'd have all his work digitized for Project Gutenberg.
It taught me that it’s more fun to build than destroy but that every once in a while you need to break everything down again for parts so you can build up again but better. Therefore it taught me the rule of best practices.
It taught me efficiency. How to build with only the parts you have. I would go to other kids’ houses who might have some new tricked out brick that came in a new set. It would be a rotating brick perhaps that allowed you to build a firetruck with a ladder that could turn 360 degrees. If I wanted the same function on a truck I built I’d have to figure out a way to get 360 degrees of motion out of square bricks. So I’d build a long channel to house a square axel or attach bricks to a wheel and then figure out a way to convert the 180 degree angle of the wheel support to 90 degrees by using angle bricks.
It taught me to read the flaming manual and how to read it and any included diagrams. This has helped me with everything from installing a new hard drive to assembling Ikea furniture.
(As an aside, I’d always read the manual, construct the toy on the box cover and once I’d done that I would break it back apart and start building what I wanted. I guess that’s where I learned that deferred pleasures are the best pleasures.)
So there you have it. Everything I know, I learned from playing with Lego. The argument can be made that I already had some these qualities in my personality but then what a co-incidence that I was given Lego to play with. But even in the case that these attributes were already formed, at the very least Lego developed those properties, confirmed them, and encouraged them. There’s no doubt in my mind that Lego contributed to my Gold personality and was probably entirely responsible for it.
My kids'll be swimming in Lego.