Unintended Consequences #1: Lego

“We’re trying to build a robot out of Lego which can put together a copy of itself with Lego pieces.” – Rodney Brooks, MIT

More than a ubiquitous and ingenious toy, Lego is a way of seeing the world that has influenced an entire generation of businessmen, scientists and engineers working at the cutting edge of computing and robotics.

“The thing I’m most fond of is Lego Mindstorms. I’ve been doing some classified things with them.” – Larry Page, Google

“Bill Gates and the owner of Lego…have been meeting for a long time.” – T B Sorensen, EVP, Lego

This relationship with computing is well-established, but Lego also has an influence on the wider scientific community. In fields as diverse as genetics, astrophysics and statistics “Lego-like” has become a ready metaphor for modular systems able to construct a multiplicity of forms from basic, self-binding units.

“People should learn how to play Lego with their minds. Concepts are building bricks” – Vitorino Ramos

The metaphor’s prevalence reveals as much about scientists’ modes of thinking as it does about the actual workings of the world – modes of thinking arguably shaped directly by the toy itself. Meanwhile, Lego’s popularity as a tool for teaching science and engineering means that new generations are growing up steeped in this legoistic world-view.

The toy succeeds because it re-imagines the world in a kind of pixelated low resolution to let users build simple models of complex objects. A child who struggles to make a satisfactory Plasticine duck, for example, will have little trouble making one from Lego bricks. Its lo-rez system favors approximation over exactitude – except at the biggest scales a Lego model is always more a symbol of a thing than its replica.

This ability to simplify and make manageable partly explains Lego’s appeal to those thinking about complex systems. And the legoistic conception of the world as logical, modular, mechanistic and “atomized” is useful up to a point, but surely breaks down as a metaphor for the sub-atomic realm, or for dealing with the spiritual and metaphysical.

Regardless, Lego resonates with geeks, for whom it has become something of a cult – and it is through them that the brick effects our lives in surprising ways. Most of these may be buried within the engineering of the various technological systems and processes we encounter, but perhaps its conceptual influence on scientists effects us as well.

Scientists are the self-appointed describers of our world, and many of us come to see it in large part through their eyes. They shape our surroundings and determine the character of our encounters with life. And although seeing things as modular, mechanistic and logical can be useful, so can seeing things as fluid, organic and illogical.

If there is a danger in legoism – and I’m not sure there is really – it’s that the metaphor ends up defining the subject instead of merely illuminating it. And ingenious as a Legoland may be, it lacks the glorious chaos, uncertainty, randomness and mystery that ultimately give life its piquancy. Lego’s seductively elegant system and bright colors ultimately mask something cold and hard.

“Metaphors are dangerous.” – Milan Kundera

All that aside, Lego is a wondrous thing – each piece so clean and precise, moulded to incredibly fine tolerances to provide just enough stickiness. The early design was actually copied from Hillary Page, an English toy-maker and the founder of Kiddicraft. (Page committed suicide just before Lego began marketing itself in Britain.)

Before the toy could really take off Lego had to make several design improvements, the most important: in 1957 they added the tubes on the underside to give Lego its amazing flexibility as a system. Other innovations followed, including the addition of wheels in 1962 (before then Lego had been strictly about buildings). Within 40 years they would be making more tires than Goodyear.

In the 50 years and 6 billion blocks that have passed since O. K. Christiansen bought his first injection moulding machine, countless imaginary worlds have evolved and been torn apart; while each minute thousands of fleeting creations flicker in and out of existence. Perhaps then Lego’s most enduring quality is the way it has come to embody a particular world-view, and the impact that world-view has had on the most influential technologists of our time.

“I love the restrictiveness of Lego, especially the minifigures. They’re hard to pose, have limited clothing choices, hair and facial expressions. Even within these limitations, it’s amazing to see what a bit of imagination can achieve.” – Mike Stimpson

Further links:

The possible combinations of six 2X4 stud bricks

An inventory of every Lego part in existence

Home of Nathan Sawaya, Lego artist

Home of Sean Kenney, Lego artist

Home of Nicholas Foo, Lego artist

How to make a Rubik’s Cube-solving Lego robot

Slideshow: the making of a Lego brick

“Forbidden Lego”

Virtual Lego modelling software for Mac

The Guild of Bricksmiths

Brickshelf, Lego-builders community

Hall of Bricks, Lego enthusiasts online

Display of original Google Lego server casings at Stanford University

sHit?

I thought Droog Design‘s Do Hit Chair by Marijn Van Der Poll was a great idea perfectly in keeping with the Do brand ethos. So when I recently came across these exceptionally hostile comments at Boing-Boing I was kind of taken aback. A tiny sample:

“fckng rtrdd.”

“You’d have to be on the droogs to buy this thing.”

“Is it made from wet Mazdas?”

For a second I saw the chair through the eyes of people just not that into design – from whose perspective the chair could look pretty damned stupid. I was left wondering whether there isn’t an emperor’s clothes syndrome at work within high-concept design.

In the end I remembered that ordinary tastes are well-served. And anyway, it’s quite some achievement to create a chair that makes people angry. More than other types of design, experiments are conducted to provoke a response – it’s only if they don’t that we can consider them a “failure”.

“There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes” – R. Buckminster Fuller

Youthful Design Is Getting Old

Time to kill the bunny.

I went to the IdN Conference in Singapore a while back and came away thinking two things:

1.) It’s weird how all designers dress exactly the same. 

2.) If I see another killer bunny I am going to shoot myself.

Five years later and the pencil case doodle school of design is still with us, a mainstay of car companies, cellular networks, soft drinks and sports shoe brands looking to “humanize” themselves, or acquire an urban edge.

A more human brand

The never-ending resurgence of the ’80s may have given some of it a punk face lift, and the power of Adobe Illustrator can add a slick corporate sheen. But beneath the voguish black strips of reversed Futura Bold or pink vector art silhouettes, it’s the same tired old fashion.

`

True, the added richness of all that illustration brightens up the anodyne Swiss school. But selling $40,000 cars using skateboard graphics? It’s a symptom of our cult of youth, an obsession that shows no sign of abating. The style may evolve, but the content remains the same: street culture filtered through a white middle-class art school sensibility, used to wrap grown-up consumer goods in cuteness or a fantasy of youth rebellion.

So now that street has become Main St. what is a self-respecting rebel or underground stylist to do? It’s not inevitable that powerful and subversive = raw and hand-drawn. Think of Peter Saville‘s work for Factory Records. Slick.

Where’s the new order?

Perhaps the rise of Obamanation and the “death” of capitalism will mean an earnest new generation of re-politicized youth. Content ascendant. Leaving agency art directors and their brands to follow suit and behave like adults again.

As for the killer bunny – it has entered the web culture lexicon as a fairly popular avatar. (Though not more popular than that grand daddy of subverted innocence, the killer clown.) Meanwhile, a mass of jejune designers have yet to tire of the twisted-cute cliché. It persists because the image of a machinegun wielding kitten or moody babydoll resonates with graphic designers, who see themselves as essentially powerless.

I’ll show you whose boss

Bullied by clients, assailed by the inherent redneckism of popular taste, the cute/killer figure is designers saying: “This is me. You may think I’m a nice shmuck with funky sneakers and a pliable manner, but in fact I’m a twisted fiend and I could kill you if I wanted.” The killer bunny and it’s ilk is the Columbine massacre writ in vinyl.

Personally, I think its time to move on. It’s a victim’s fantasy.

The original killer bunny