Architects-to-be play with LEGO

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. A number of bright ideas had been discussed by the students in the three hours length workshop and at the end they were asked to build a shared model: after each of them presented their personal idea, after discussing and investigating the individual models, the group was asked to become a team by building a single shared model. Students have taken their individual models, have negotiated their visions, their ideas, their concepts and they come out with a new model. The new model is simply a shared knowledge literally constructed and agreed by all participants and that final model represents the new roadmap of their project. This is a clip of what happened… (Video is in Italian with English Subtitles) A big thank you to the Faculty of Architecture at University of Ferrara, to the professors and students who allowed this experience and who engaged in this experience.