Activity

Clara – welcome to the community. What you do sounds very interesting. Can you please elaborate more – how do you do this, please?

Hello Marko, thanks!
We support social leaders, teachers and entrepreneurs for social change to generate innovation through design thinking consultancy and training, so we call it social design. There is already plenty of evidence that social design is an effective method to solve social problems, specially those wicked ones as most social problems are (poverty, unschooling, urban violence,…). Social design includes the phases of understanding the context and the public (inspiration), ideation (including prototyping) and implementation.
Now, most people working in the social sector in Portugal are qualified in sociology, education, social service or humanities, so they are very good working with concepts and in analytical/reasearch work. However it very difficult to ask them to think in terms of graphic or physical representation of their solutions (synthesis), required in the prototyping stage. Here we have introduce Lego!! It’s seen as playful, easy and cool activity and not uncomfortable (as drawing was for a big number of our participants). There is big a bigger engagement and motivation in the methods after the introduction of LEGO. Still, we are fighting that participants look for “the little people” to represent social concepts, as these involve people, the groups are always in the search of more legomen :). See some pictures of our work in our Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/FutureBalloons/photos_stream

Clara – that is great. I have added your post also to the front page for others to see: http://seriousplaypro.com/2014/10/30/lego-bricks-and-design-thinking/

If you would like to purchase more “Small Lego people” then you can. Lego is in fact selling packages of minifigures that you can obtain simply via Amazon, e.g.: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0085Y3MTO/?tag=seriousplay-20 or http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0085Y3GCW/?tag=seriousplay-20

Thanks Marko! I wasn’t expecting such an honour :). We actually don’t want to give them more lego people, but make them aware that they can create people with all the other bricks..still difficult, though.

My pleasure! Of course – there is always a balance of “building with actual physical embodiment”, “building with symbolic bricks” and “building with words”. Some people prefer actual things, the others prefer to build with symbols or words. :)

You are right! While we should give people a great time, I believe that we also give them tips to get out of their confort zone. In our sessions we want to look for innovative solutions, and, that might not be possible without a change in the perspective. As you say, there should be a balance.