Dean Meyers

Central Otago WasteBusters manager Glenys Byrne gets adults to use their imagination with Lego Serious Play.

JO MCKENZIE-MCLEAN

A Central Otago waste manger is proving lego isn’t just for children. Glenys Byrne, general manager of Central Otago WasteBusters, held a Lego Serious Play (LSP) workshop earlier this month with a group of people from WasteBusters and the Central Otago District Council, including councillor Clair Higginson and Bernie Scurr from health and safety.

Byrne said she was one of only a few facilitators nationwide trained to hold the LSP workshop, which was designed to enhance business performance through building with lego bricks. LSP had been used by organisations such as Nasa and Coca-Cola, she said.

“The bricks allow people to think freely, and express themselves as they create, the process is not reliant on the typical verbal jousting that goes on in meetings, or filling up a blank page, instead, participants use a carefully chosen selection of bricks and a unique process where people ‘think through their fingers’ – unleashing insight, inspiration and imagination.”

There was a bit of head-scratching around the table when the group was asked to create something out of lego bricks to reflect a sustainable future in Central Otago. However, with only five minutes to complete the task, the participants quickly starting building wind turbines, vegetable gardens, electric cars, solar-powered homes and wind operated irrigation systems.

Higginson said the workshop was insightful and challenged them to use their own creativity, work in pairs and then share their visions as a group: “I found the hands-on part of it helped get over anxieties we may have had in speaking up in the group.” Scurr said the exercise reinforced how different everyone was and how differently everyone thought.

Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/9969808/Councillors-get-serious-about-building-blocks

Reinhard Ematinger has published an interesting radio interview about Lego Serious Play on Vimeo

Engineering professor Candace Chan, a nanoscientist, checks in with undergraduate students Ruben Hernandez (aeronautics major) and Dylan Baker (mechanical engineering major) as they work on their LEGO models

From: (Nanowerk News) Students at Arizona State University are learning how to play.

ASU undergraduates have the opportunity to enroll in a challenging course this fall, designed to re-introduce the act of play as a problem-solving technique. The course is offered as part of the larger project, Cross-disciplinary Education in Social and Ethical Aspects of Nanotechnology, which received nearly $200,000 from the National Science Foundation’s Nano Undergraduate Education program.

Engineering professor Candace Chan, a nanoscientist, checks in with undergraduate students Ruben Hernandez (aeronautics major) and Dylan Baker (mechanical engineering major) as they work on their LEGO models during a Feb. 24 pilot workshop.

The project is the brainchild of Camilla Nørgaard Jensen, a doctoral scholar in the ASU Herberger Institute’s design, environment and the arts doctoral program. Participants will use an approach called LEGO Serious Play to solve what Jensen calls “nano-conundrums” – ethical dilemmas arising in the field of nanotechnology.

“LEGO Serious Play is an engaging vehicle that helps to create a level playing field, fostering shared conversation and exchange of multiple perspectives,” said Jensen, a trained LEGO Serious Play facilitator. “This creates an environment for reflection and critical deliberation of complex decisions and their future impacts.”

LEGO Serious Play methods are often used by businesses to strategize and encourage creative thinking. In ASU’s project, students will use LEGO bricks to build metaphorical models, share and discuss their creations, and then adapt and respond to feedback received by other students. The expectation is that this activity will help students learn to think and communicate “outside the box” – literally and figuratively – about their work and its long-term societal effects.

Jensen works with a team of faculty members, including Thomas Seager, an associate professor and Lincoln Fellow of Ethics and Sustainability in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, one of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering; Cynthia Selin, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainability and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, housed at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at ASU; and Mark Hannah, an assistant professor in the rhetoric and composition program in the ASU Department of English, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Fifteen engineering students enrolled in the Grand Challenge Scholar Program participated in a Feb. 24 pilot workshop to test project strategies. Comments from students included, “I experienced my ideas coming to life as I built the model,” and “I gained a perspective as to how ideas cannot take place entirely in the head.” These anecdotal outcomes confirmed the team’s assumptions that play and physical activity can enhance the formation and communication of ideas.

“Technology is a creative and collaborative process,” said Seager, who is principal investigator for the grant. “I want a classroom that will unlock technology creativity, in which students from every discipline can be creative. For me, overcoming obstacles to communication is just the first step.”

Seager’s work teaching ethical reasoning skills to science and engineering graduate students will help inform the project. Selin’s research on the social implications of new technologies, and Hannah’s expertise in professional and technical communication will facilitate the dialogue-based approach to understanding the communication responsibilities of transdisciplinary teams working in nanotechnology. A steering committee of 12 senior advisers is helping to guide the project’s progress.

“Being a new scientific field that involves very complex trade-offs and risk when it comes to implementation, the subject of ethics in nanoscience is best addressed in a transdisciplinary setting. When problems are too complex to be solved by one discipline alone, the approach needs to go beyond the disciplinary silos,” said Jensen.

The ASU project will leverage LEGO Serious Play’s promised “systematic creativity” in an immersive nanotechnology environment, which the team believes is a natural fit because of its micro-to-macro scale and its hands-on approach to experiential learning and deliberation.

“As we train the next generation of students to understand the opportunities and responsibilities involved in creating and using emerging technologies that have the potential to benefit society, we need to advance our capacity to teach diverse stakeholders how to communicate effectively,” said Jensen.

Source: Arizona State University

From Pete Roessler’s blog

For the third time in a row I had the pleasure to participate at Play 4 Agile (Un-)Conference at Rückersbach. Three years ago Play 4 Agile 2012 was my first experience with Open Space

An interesting YouTube video clip shows the contents of Lego Serious Play Starter Kit (art.no. 2000414).

Starting from today you can directly order all four LSP kits directly via LEGO Online Shop:
– Lego Serious Play Set of 100 Exploration Bags (2000409)
– Lego Serious Play Starter Kit (2000414)
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Lego Serious Play in Lego Education – video about students from Chile and from Raleigh, NC establishing video link to meet and using thereafter Lego Serious Play to discuss some different issues about their

Eugene Wheeler and Branson Moore have produced an interesting video about use of Lego Serious Play in Classrooms in Mexico. Lots of interesting observations on how the  

LEGO artist Mike Doyle has published an interesting book to LEGO aficionados that has hundreds of pages of interesting LEGO artwork. Hopefully some inspiration for LSP facilitators, too. :) Look at the book

As Serious Play Starter Kit is again out of stock then people have asked about the suggestions on what are the best options for replacing those kits. Starter Kit comes with 228 items included and there is not

Teacher Paula White has written in her blog Amplifying Minds how she regularly uses Lego Serious Play in her classroom.:

Hasn’t everyone played with Legos at some point? Well, the answer to that is no … of

Vitamins Design Studio has produced a fabulous wall calendar with the help of LEGO Bricks.

They have written on their website: The Lego calendar is a wall mounted time planner that we invented for our

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LEGO Foundation helped to organise UN Global Compact Leaders Summit on “Architects of a Better World,” where global CEOs carried out series of exercises with creativity kits of LEGO bricks to build their