LEGO Archives - Dr Lee Fallin

A box of bricks from the LEGO BYGGLEK Set

LEGO Serious Play: The IKEA & LEGO Dream Team

March 12, 2023March 12, 2023 Lee Fallin Leave a comment

This blog post discusses the possibility of the IKEA LEGO sets for LEGO Serious Play. In 2018, IKEA and LEGO announced they were going to play together. This led to the development of the BYGGLEK LEGO collection, available exclusively at IKEA stores. This product range included a series of LEGO storage boxes and a set of 201 LEGO bricks designed for free play. As described by IKEA:

Creating more space for play
The BYGGLEK LEGO® collection offers play storage solutions and a LEGO brick set unique to IKEA. The boxes easily find harmony with your home so the creations can be put on display, keeping the story alive until the next play time.
IKEA website

Having used LEGO Serious Play as an aspect of my research and work for some years, I’ve recently considered how the BYGGLEK LEGO collection can be used for LEGO Serious Play. Before I get into this, however, a brief introduction to LEGO Serious Play:

What is LEGO Serious Play?

If you’ve not used LEGO Serious Play before, it is a creative approach to meeting facilitation that uses LEGO bricks as a form of collaboration and communication. It has a track record of success across education and business – shaking up traditional meetings and learning opportunities with the use of LEGO. This has taken it beyond meetings and into the classroom and sphere of research.

Think about all the times you’ve set out Flipchart and pens – and most groups struggle to settle on a scribe – ‘You do it’ – ‘No! You!’. This doesn’t happen with LEGO Serious Play. Everyone is in! I’ve used LEGO Serious Play with participants of all ages for research, learning and business strategy purposes.

Serious work: How to facilitate meetings with LEGO Serious Play Method

How to facilitate LEGO Serious Play online

IKEA and LEGO Serious Play

So far, my LEGO Serious Play practice has focused on a large collection of bricks that all participants share. I blogged about the sets used to build my LEGO Serious Play collection, and since 2021, that collection has been the staple of my LEGO Serious Play kit. I’ve recently wanted to explore individual LEGO Serious Play kits so each participant has their own bricks. This can reduce the scrabble for bricks between participants and reduce much of the noise in the session (something some participants can find distracting).

There is also a potential for equity. One of the LEGO Serious Play practitioners I worked with insisted on participants having the same bricks. This raises the question – what bricks to use? My colleague went to a LEGO Store and used the Pick a Brick wall to build a collection of identical sets. This has always been too risky for my liking – too reliant on the store’s stock of bricks. It’s also a bit of an administrative hassle, especially if the store is busy. Then came the BYGGLEK LEGO Set:

A photo of the BYGGLEK LEGO set - a white box features both the LEGO and IKEA logos.

Digging into the BYGGLEK set

This IKEA-exclusive LEGO set contains 201 bricks, including a brick remover. Within the set there are a range of plates, bricks, a door, some windows, a range of small bricks and enough parts for two Minifigures. As I’ve come to get to know this set in closer detail, I’ve become more convinced it’s a perfect range for LEGO Serious Play. It has a really nice range of bricks, allowing participants to communicate a whole range of ideas. So you can get an idea, I’ve laid out the bricks in this box below:

A box full of the BYGGLEK LEGO set to demonstrate how it could be used for LEGO Serious Play.

At 201 bricks, it feels a really nice size for individual use. I love the variety of bricks included in the set. There is a handful of regular bricks, but the body of the set includes a variety of brick colours and sizes. It has some nice, intricate details. I love the inclusion of some leaves and green elements alongside some food pieces, windows and a door.

Just the right size and configuration

This catalogue image unintentionally shows some potential LEGO Serious Play uses for the set.

This catalogue image gives you a good idea of the scale of the set – or the scale of the models that can be built with it. It isn’t enough LEGO to make the larger, more dramatic models – but it’s good enough for some detailed and intricate models (which is my favourite kind – every brick has meaning. The two Minifigures are nice and echo the days of plainer characters, a contrast to a lot of the licensed figures that dominate now.

While there is debate over using Minifigures for LEGO Serious Play, I’ve always included them in my sets. Yes – it can funnel participant responses around more concrete than the metaphorical use of LEGO, it can also enable the metaphorical messages. I’ve had too many participants wasting time building something to represent people or a person. Minifigures just cut straight to it! As mentioned above, the plainness of these figures also stops the message from getting conflated with a licensed character.

Keeping things tidy – the BYGGLEK Storage boxes

IKEA brought their famed trend to the BYGGLEK collection – flat-pack LEGO! Yes! They’ve managed to create flat-pack LEGO in a way only IKEA could. The BYGGLEK collection includes four different sizes of LEGO storage box. The two smaller sizes are fully assembled and come in a box of three (one small box, two extra small boxes). The two larger size boxes are the ones requiring assembly. It’s a tool-less construction, and the pieces click well together to create a solid box, perfect for storing LEGO. More importantly, the box lids double as LEGO base plates. The boxes themselves can also be used as part of the build, and the larger boxes have LEGO-compatible recesses.

So – back to LEGO Serious Play! The medium-size BYGGLEK box (26x18x12 cm) is great for storing those individual LEGO Serious Play kits. The BYGGLEK LEGO set fits within the box nicely and includes some nice LEGO-compatible studs that can be used in models. There is also enough space for digging through the pile of bricks to find what you need – within the box. The box itself can also be used as part of the models, of course. Unfortunately, the lid sits on top of the box – it doesn’t click securely. As such, I tend to use elastic bands to hold things together when I’m on the move. Not a great look – but it does the job.

Over to you!

I hope this post has been useful! Let me know what you think. I’d also love to hear if anyone else has used the IKEA + LEGO combination for LEGO Serious Play ????

LEGO Serious Play starter kit for research & teaching

October 3, 2021October 3, 2021 Lee Fallin 3 Comments

LEGO Serious Play was an essential aspect of my research method, getting participants to ‘build’ their answer, not just talk it through. I’ve also used it as a teaching facilitation tool to support critical and divergent thinking. LEGO is one of my most favourite research and teaching methods, as you can let people work through answers with the use of LEGO, and then capture the salient points when they share their build. It not only saves a lot of data processing for the researcher, but it is a lot more fun for participants. For teaching, it supports different forms of thinking and really gets ALL students involved. While LEGO Serious Play is a distinct facilitation approach and you can get trained to use it, there are also some helpful books to get you started. I recommend Blair and Rillo’s SERIOUSWORK as a good place to start.

To use LEGO for any aspect of research or teaching, you first need to buy some! This blog highlights the choices I made to build my budget LEGO Serious Play kit.

LEGO Serious Play sets are awesome! But expensive. There is a range of sets available on the official LEGO shop, but they were beyond my budget as a self-funded doctoral student. I had to improvise. This article will introduce the sets I purchased and how I think they worked for research and teaching use.

My haul

The LEGO sets I purchased for my LEGO Serious Play kit

LEGO classic

LEGO Classic sets are a brilliant way to bulk out your LEGO Serious Play kit. You get a lot of brick for your money, and the variety of colours is fantastic. I’m so jealous of children today – LEGO had about five colours when I was a child. I already had a Large Creative Brick Box (10698) – so bought a couple more to serve as the baseline of my LEGO Serious Play kit. The plastic storage boxes they come in are also the perfect place to keep the LEGO stored away between uses. In addition to these larger sets, I also bought a couple more classic sets, one featuring lots of windows and doors (11004) – the other featuring lots of wheels (11014).

Classic + more windows

11004 – Windows of Creativity

Classic + more doors

11014 – Bricks and wheels starter building set

The available sets vary over time, but I have found they usually have a classic set on offer with extra wheels and another with windows and doors. These are useful additions to any LEGO Serious Play kit so I’d advise investing in such sets. Windows and doors are not only useful in a literal sense, but they work well for metaphors. Wheels work well for movement, vehicles and more. I’ve also seen a set with extra roof tiles which I think could be useful. It’ll certainly be part of my next LEGO purchase.

Interesting bricks

Next up I wanted to add a set with some different/interesting bricks. To be honest, any set would do for this – but I wanted to avoid anything licenced. I felt items like a Star Wars brick or a Spiderman Minifigure would not serve as universal references, so wanted to avoid them. I think Minecraft LEGO sets are particularly useful as they have lots of transparent tiles and colourful bricks. At the time I purchased my kit, LEGO was celebrating its 60 year anniversary and had launched some special Building Bigger Thinking sets. I purchased World Fun (10403), which contained some useful pieces like a treasure chest, eyes, columns, helicopter and a couple of Minifigures. I also chose Ocean’s Bottom (10404) which has more eyes, wings, wheels and transparent bricks.

10403 – World Fun

10404 – Ocean’s Bottom

All these LEGO classic sets built the bulk of my LEGO Serious Play kit. This gave me lots of standard bricks, including windows, doors, wheels and more. The next pieces I used to build my collection were all a matter of choice. For example, baseplates can be useful for a lot of LEGO Serious Play kits – but they were not something I needed for my particular research. As such, I decided to forego them. If you need to facilitate collaborative builds then baseplates are the perfect way to bring this together.

Pick a Brick

To top off my LEGO Serious Play kit, I wanted to choose a few additional bricks. To help with this, I used the Pick a Brick station at a LEGO store. I focused on extra eyes, small tile pieces and anything else small. This would allow participants to build intricate/small/detailed models – should they wish.

Minifigures

Minifigures can be a bit of a divisive topic when considering their use in LEGO Serious Play. They can lead participants to focus on people (which may not be a bad thing) when they’re building their answers. For my research, I felt participants would benefit from Minifigures. Libraries are inherently social spaces – and people are part of that. I didn’t want participants wasting time in my research sessions ‘building people’ – so Minifigures it was!

Again, I felt the best place to get these was through a LEGO shop. There are build-a-Minifigure stations in LEGO shops allowing you to build three custom figures per pack. Four packs (12 figures) covered my needs.

Preparing the LEGO

The worst thing you can do is walk into your first LEGO Serious Play research or teaching session with a load of new boxes of LEGO. It’s worth spending some time unboxing and unbagging it to ensure it is ready to use. I also spent time assembling a few elements to make them ready for use. For example, adding tyres to wheels, putting wheels on axels, putting panes in windows and adding doors to their frames. While participants are free to switch things around, it does mean the bricks are ready for use without needing to combine these pieces.

From the unboxing photo below, you can see there was a lot of plastic bags to ditch. I also wanted to find a way to layout the LEGO without getting it everywhere – so I used the cardboard box lids from printer paper boxes. It worked really well to stop LEGO falling all over the floor during my research sessions.

Ready to go!

With all the LEGO purchased, unpacked and ready to go, I was able to start using it for teaching and research purposes. I still keep the LEGO stored in the big yellow boxes that came with the larger sets. I also bring a load of those empty box lids to pour LEGO out and stop it from getting everywhere.

LEGO works as a wonderful research and educational tool. I took this snap from one of the first sessions I facilitated three years ago. I can’t wait to share some more of my reflections on this.

Using LEGO as a teaching aid for academic writing at university

October 2, 2021October 3, 2021 Lee Fallin Leave a comment

This post will introduce my approach to using LEGO to teach academic writing. I conduct a lot of personal appointments with foundation and undergraduate students. For some students, ordering their ideas and structuring them is a real challenge. This problem tends to stem from:

not knowing where to start,
a sense of being overwhelmed,
the volume of information they consult,
the volume of information they feel *needs* including in their assignment.

Further, it is not just a case of ordering ideas, but structuring them that can be problematic. I feel that a lot of the poorly structured essays that I see are failing at the paragraph level. This is a real issue for a lot of students, especially those with less writing experience, those who have taken a break from education, or those who have no experience of essay-style examination. The latter is particularly an issue for international students from countries with different approaches to higher education assessment, often focusing on examinations above coursework essays.

This post will detail how I’ve used LEGO to discuss some of these issues with students, and use it to help them outline their approach to academic writing. This starts with a student I saw a couple of weeks ago. I was struggling to communicate the structural elements of an essay to them. The student had lots of ideas, but simply did not know where to start and all the approaches in study skill books were simply not working for them. Instead of just rephrasing, I tried a different approach, running downstairs to grab my tub of LEGO. I think LEGO bricks are an excellent way to visualise some elements of academic writing and decided this was the perfect time to give it a go. I think this metaphor for academic writing structure can really help students struggling to structure their ideas – or more appropriately, to help students who are overwhelmed with their own ideas and sorting them out.

Let me know what you think by commenting below, or getting in touch via @LeeFallin. You can also find out which LEGO sets I’ve used to build my teaching and research kit.

Using LEGO as a metaphor for academic writing

When planning your essay, it can be really daunting. You end up with ideas all over the place:

LEGO bricks spread all over a table in no order

You need to order these ideas into groups. The act of doing this enables you to identify the major aspects of your essay. As expected, some ideas will be discarded at this phrase too (see the pile to the right side). It is still worth keeping a record of these as they may be useful at a later stage (who would EVER throw a LEGO brick in a bin!?!?!):

LEGO bricks grouped into piles of the same colour. Some to the right are discarded.

Once you have grouped all of your ideas like this, they form the basis of your overall argument. Each brick group is an aspect of this, forming one of the micro-arguments that lead your reader to the conclusion in your overall argument. These micro-arguments (brick groups) may by represented in an individual paragraph, or across a group of paragraphs. This process is not easy. At this idea stage, some of your groups will end up too large and you will need to break them up across two or more paragraphs. When this is the case, it is hard to distinguish which paragraph an idea belongs in. In reality, you are more likely to come across this problem later in writing when you have an oversized paragraph that you need to break up:

A pile of yellow LEGO bricks of subtlety different shades

When all the elements of your points, arguments or ideas are grouped into their individual paragraphs, they need further structuring:

A pile of brown bricks come together into a block

A solid paragraph should have a good structure. I recommend TEAL as a good starting point:

Topic – A brief introduction to what the paragraph is about. What is your point?
Evidence – Academic evidence, reflections, your own research/data
Analysis – The ‘so what’? Persuade the reader that your conclusion is the correct one
Link – Link this paragraph to the next – or to your overall argument.

(Indeed – this stage may be the *best* starting point for some students, but the route described so far is excellent for those who struggle to structure all their ideas in the planning phase)

TEAL is a good way to structure all those ideas into a coherent paragraph:

LEGO bricks are an excellent metaphor for how you need to link all these elements together. The bumps and they way they interlock with bricks above makes this point clear. Everything with a paragraph must coherently link together and make sense:

Once you have your individual paragraphs, they need to be assembled in the right order. This is often done as you go along, but as you being to edit, you may realise they need re-ordering. It isn’t just the structure that may change, and as you edit, some smaller points may need removing as you further refine your ideas (and try to get under your word count):

A long block of assembled bricks. Colours are striped in groups to represent paragraphs.

All of these elements together can help you rule your own writing:

Taking this into practice

To put this into practice, I often recommend students grab a stack of post-it notes or use a mindmap to get all of their ideas on the table. The principles above serve as a great framework from which to interpret all these ideas. Working from the ideation phase, grouping/sorting and refining the order and breaking it into paragraphs. If all else fails, literally using the LEGO bricks works well too. Small post-it notes can be used to adhere ideas to the bricks in a way that doesn’t require cleaning them afterwards. This works perfectly with Duplo too.

The model above is designed to help students identify their main points, group their ideas under these main points, and then divide those points into interlinked paragraphs. As the bricks represent, these all need ‘clicking together’ to form a stable essay (or stable LEGO model!). This may seem a little obvious for advanced writers, but it is certainly worth trying with those new to academic essay writing. As above, please let me know what you think! I should also note a quick thank you to my colleague Sue Watling. She indicated this approach was interesting when I mentioned it in conversation, so I figured it was worth expanding on my blog.

Tag: LEGO