Serious Play Forum

[Jason]

Lego Serious Play and Design Thinking: A means for gaining Empathy

I recently ran a session for a mentor/men-tee program where I work. We had around 40 members of the program come for this session. I have been running LSP sessions for about a year and teaching Design Thinking for just around two years. This was the first time I was able to try building a session using Lego bricks for empathy work.

The mentors were paired up with their men-tees. They built a tower and shared it as a warm up. I then asked them to build their goals and aspirations. After sharing their model, their partner shared the story back to them. They were then asked to build the obstacles that stand in their way. I used portions of the Design Thinking mindsets, prompting folks to dig deeper into what they were hearing and ask open-ended questions like, “Why is that important to you?” and then asking “Why?” again.

The feedback from the session was overwhelmingly positive. I had few great quotes: “I had chills!” and “I learned more about my partner in half an hour than in the weeks we’ve been talking”. Combining Design Thinking and LSP is a very interesting path to me. More to come!

[Marko Rillo]

Jason,

Thanks for sharing – sounds like great fun. Would be interesting to find out more.

You might have seen this, but there was a recent post about the connections of the Lego Serious Play and design thinking on this community site. Namely – a reference to a presentation of Arindam Basu:

A Couple of Slideshares about Lego Serious Play

Perhaps it is interesting also for you?
Marko

[Clara Rodrigues]

Hello Jason,
I am new here, but sure this is the topic for me! I use LSP in the prototyping stages of design thinking, with very nice results, especially, considering that I am working for innovation in the social sector with people who are much more verbal than hands-on. (I just described my experience here:http://seriousplaypro.com/members/clararodrigues/activity/6206/
I have never thought about using it in the emphatic stage… but now I am willing to :)

[Eli De Friend]

Hi guys,
I was curious about your mention of using LSP to create empathy in Design Thinking. While we may all agree that LSP might have the power to facilitate empathy, though I’m not sure that is its primary goal. If you look at IDEO’s main web site, they don’t mention empathy – it’s only when you go to their ideo.org site that you find them claiming that human-centred design creates empathy.
This seems to contrast with Stanford’s view that you start a design thinking process with a stage called “Empathize”. So which comes first the Empathy or HCD? And who are we to believe, Stanford or IDEO?
Which brings me back to LSP. To my understanding, LEGO SERIOUS PLAY builds on mutual respect to construct a shared, consensual vision or perception. The objective is not feel another’s pain, joy or energy. If I’ve misunderstood something, please enlighten me, because perhaps others are as misguided as I am.

Warm regards,

Eli

[Clara Rodrigues]

Hi Eli,

I am also curious about how does LSP works for empathy.
Just a little add on to your doubts: empathic attitude is key issue during all the process of Design Thinking and all the approaches I know of it include empathy. The relevance of it might change according to the stage, but it is most proeminent during the first stage. IDEO calls this phase Inspiration, which includes learning from the others (“you’ll learn directly from the people you’re designing for as you immerse yourself in their lives and come to deeply understand their needs and aspirations”). This is empathy, even if not mentioned. Others call this phase “Empathize” or “Research”, but it has to do with the same posture of the designer. For more details on IDEO’s view on empathy, check the book of Tim Brown, “Change for Design”, p.49.

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