Creative processes always require time and the more difficulties and challenges they face, the more the resulting projects are innovative and original.
I have found myself playing around with LSP (Oops, I did it again!) and LegoViews a lot and the newest projects will be shortly revealed. In the meantime, while I am allowed to disclose the very first new initiative I have been working on, I have opened a FaceBook LegoViews‘ page: feel free to join!
Recently I have been pointed out that I spell both LegoViews and Legoviews and actually, there’s a reason for this, which might be subtle, but it makes a lot of difference.
LegoViews [LWs] is the Method: LEGO are the tool used to extract Views, to delve into human perceptions and representations, to discover and to create new meanings. It’s a modern maieutic approach based on the constructionist theories, which has been developed from LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. It’s actually my main personal challenge and the result of three years of thinking, testing and learnig by doing.
LegoViews is more than a way to challenge traditional journalism: it’s an attempt to explore the world through other people’s perception of reality and their views of the world. It’s a way to build worlds with words through unusual and different cognitive mechanisms.
Traditional interviews are generally based on well defined dynamics. There is a large literature about this and there are experts who train people on how to handle and conduct interviews. And there are also a number of books and essays that teach journalists, researcher and professionals how to make effective interviwes. Everything is codified, recognisable and known.
LegoViews‘ challenge is that of radically changing the psychological and relational dynamics between the interviewer and the interviewee so that the cognitive processes underlying the interaction are completely different: when we are asked a question, generally we have just very few seconds to make up an answer which reflects a number of social, relational, emotional and contextual variables. This very short time generally produces standard answers and interviewees rely on stories they have already in their minds, which perhaps have already been told and are well codified and organised in their minds.
But when the question does not accept an immediate verbal feedback, the answers are much different from the usual already known and told stories the interviewees had in their mind before engaging into this kind of interview: both the way the concepts emerge and how they are expressed are necessarily different.
What emerges, the result of a LegoViews is a Legoview [Lv]: a view of the world mediate through LEGO bricks.
But in the very last months LegoViews has developed even further and from a simple pseudo-journalistic interviewing method, it’s becoming much more an investigative tool: it’s not about reporting journalistic truths, but it’s rather about discovering human nature, exploring the infinite nuances of our thoughts, our feelings, our representational capacities. If combined with other disciplines, applied to different fields and with different purposes, the results LegoViews can achieve, are truly surprising.
LegoViews is a combinable and flexible method, which can be integrated into complex research and investigative processes to produce new meanings and bring to practical results. I have tested LegoViews and combined it with several different approaches in areas and for applications which were not even imagined when I engaged with this journey, but whose results are encouraging and exciting.
But all these new experimentations are the topic of the next posts. Be patient. It won’t take long to discover what is happening and what LegoViews can do, because it’s really true: hands know more than we know.
My2Bricks,
Pat
LegoViews 