March 27, 2013
For those who were not there and for those who want to keep reflecting on the contents presented on Saturday 23rd March in Ferrara [Italy], here are the Keynote speakers’ presentation. A big thank you to all the speakers who agreed to share their precious and inspiring material!
Robert Rasmussen, Rasmussen Consulting (Denmark) | The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY method: a thinking, communication and problem solving techniques for groups insights to its the origin, purpose, functionality and theoretical underpinnings.
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Posted in Architecture, education, Events & Fun, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, theory |
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March 25, 2013
On March 23rd, at Restauro, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY had been the main player.
In times where playing safe is not possible anymore, we need to play seriously and through the inspiring talks of our keynote speakers, participants to the event have been taken to a new dimension, where LEGO are a tools to build the intangible world of ideas, where imagination becomes a key asset to rethink organisation,where architects find new ways to design the space and the experiences, where students become learners and people can build their requirements and needs to help organisations’ to properly develop their products.
It has been a fascinating journey, where speakers engaged with the bricks, with themselves and the audience trying to provide a rather unique picture of the endless potential hidden in those little bricks.
Proceedings, videos and more pics will follow, here you are the very first ones!
Again, Thanks all – to the inspiring and amazing speakers, and to the people who joined!
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February 17, 2013
“For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.” [Plato, Theaetetus]
When we want to know something, what we do is to search for reliable sources of information, to look for people who spent their lives studying a subject, trying to give it a sense, trying to make the topic understandable and clear and adding their own insights by formulating some statements which should define – and sometimes confine – the realm of knowledge we can get.
When we search for information, the first thing we rely on is the literature on the topic: we delve into books and papers, read, listen and watch everything relevant. Like sponges, we absorb what the world have already said and thought about the subject at hand, we take one or two of those main concepts, adopt them and elaborate our personal and critical insights starting from there.
We might end becoming experts and authorities on that subject with people asking us to explain the mysteries we already faced in the early stages of our research.
We build our knowledge step by step, brick by brick, by collecting information and combining it in something that fits the existent knowledge and our experience.
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February 2, 2013
Harkness Table
I was reflecting on my experience with architecture students at University of Ferrara and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. [See the video]
I find amazing how students who did not have any clue about the content and the goals of the workshop engaged in the discussion and raised a number of enlightening ideas about Heritage. They were not asked, neither provided, any books or papers to read, the idea was to understand how a bunch of students in their early-twenties could theorise and think about Heritage independently, critically and collectively.
So, in my research about educative approaches that capitalise on collaboration and collaborative meaning-making, I’ve found about the Harkness Table. For those who are not familiar with it, this is an educative approach introduced in 1931 when Edward Harkness, a philanthropist, challenged Exeter University asking them to innovate education and provided them with an oval table. The idea behind the table, which was meant to allow 12/15 students to sit around together with their teacher, was to create a different approach to education where students were seen as a team and could be encouraged to take part to a discussion, interact and learn about collaborative practices, by reducing the influence of the teacher.
The idea of a class as a team that capitalises on teamwork and encourages interaction among students in a free environment sounded a pretty close approach to that I adopted. The Harkness Table focuses a lot on these concepts, and I’ve found it thrilling. Though the more I read about it, the more the differences emerged.
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Posted in education, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, Methodology |
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January 21, 2013
Why did I ever get so much into the bricks?
I used to play with LEGO when I was a child, like most children of my generation: my father dreamt of having an Architect daughter one day. He’d never imagined that instead of becoming an Architect and follow his dreams, I’d have kept playing with the bricks my way.
After 4 years of experiments, study and research – mostly done almost hidden in my room on my own – I have just came out and simply have found out that there was another way to delve into the power of LEGO, not as a mere playing toy, but as powerful tool to be used to find out more about ourselves, both as individuals – like the bricks’ based interviews – and as part of larger, mutually related and dependent organism, with LSP.
The way we talk and think, how we conceptualise the world and the words we use to picture our world, are just bricks of our minds, where material bricks come as a precious aid to better connect our inner thoughts.
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January 18, 2013
You can learn more about a man in one hour of play than in a year of conversation [Plato]
At Restauro 2013, the trade fair for the Art of Restoration and Conservation of our Cultural and Environmental Heritage, the first and most important Italian event dedicated to the art of restoration and the conservation of Italian artistic heritage taking place in Ferrara (Italy), we are going to play. Because a Serious Play can improve our understandings and reveal brand new dimensions of Heritage.
The Department of Architecture at University of Ferrara, together with Tekehub, and with the High Tecnology Network of Emilia Romagna, is working on an experimental exhibition stand to be presented at the Restauro 2013 in Ferrara: a new format and new contents will wait for visitors attending the event on March 20-23rd 2013. The leading idea is to explore concepts related to
Restauro: the LEGO-Box and the project of the stand
Heritage using innovative means based on methodologies that enhance knowledge sharing and meaning making.
For four days, in a multi-functional and colourful space, designed to explicitly recall LEGO bricks, using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY, participants will be involved in a number of events, speeches and thought provoking activities to encourage the discussion and improve our understand of what is Heritage. The project is called B4 – which plays on the idea of Bricks for… and the assonance with the world Before.
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Posted in Architecture, Events & Fun, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY |
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December 28, 2012
The Video is cilp taken from one of the LEGO SERIOUS PLAY workshop I run at the University of Ferrara, Faculty of Architecture in November 2012.
Students taking part to the workshop are currently working on a course project on Heritage; their main focus is Ahmedabad Heritage Walk (India). The aim of the workshop was to create a team out of the group of individuals working together and to lay the foundations for their collective work. To achieve this students engaged in a classic LSP workshop: they were first asked to define what Heritage is by building an individual LEGO model of their personal concept. Each student built their own vision and shared it with others. Sharing individual models and ideas let differences emerge: it came out that though they were all working and researching around the same topic, their individual perceptions, their focus, their ideas were very different: some students focused on the time dimension, others have seen heritage as coming from a relationship between present and past, others have highlighted the confusion and chaotic dimension related to the idea of Heritage, and others focused on the subjects who perceive, define and socially construct the concept of Heritage.
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December 18, 2012
Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier LEGO Architecture model
LEGO bricks to discover more about architecture and about architects’ mind and perception of reality. [Paesaggio Urbano 5-6/2012]
The relation between LEGO and Architecture is a longstanding one: as a response to the increasing attention to modern architecture in early 1960s, LEGO developed Scale LEGO with the ambition that architects and engineers would attempt scaling their models using LEGO.
But the relationship between Architecture and LEGO can go far beyond this historical link created by LEGO itself and it comes from a creative approach based on constructionist theories which have been developed in the 60s by Seymur Papert. Papert was among the first ones to adopt LEGO bricks as a learning tool in education and he capitalised on the strict relationship between hands and brain: it is well-know that hands are connected to between 70-80% of our brain cells, which means that through the exploitation of this neural connection people can learn and think more and in more creative ways by connecting their hands with their brain and by constructing something material. This is the assumption which lead in late ‘90s to the development of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY [LSP] a method used in organisations to help people to think, share ideas and creating teams, solve problems and define organisational strategies. This method was developed by Robert Rasmussen, at that time the director of product development for the educational market at LEGO and it was officially launched in January 2002.
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December 12, 2012
After the pic, here it is a fun clip of what happened during the LegoInterview with Francesca Valan.
It’s a short clip, just to make you feel the atmosphere and let you have a taste of the experience.
A bit thanks to Pietro for the amazing editing!
[I apologise, the video is available only in Italian now – the whole LegoView will be available shortly, with English Subtitles].
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December 12, 2012
Picture taken at University of Ferrara during the LegoView with Francesca Valan, colour designer.
Not a colour designer, but THE colour designer who worked for LEGO. Could I find a better match and a more creative and bubbling person to talk about colours and architecture?
A big thank you to Francesca and the guys, superb as ever. Video coming soon!
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LegoViews 