Research
Defining Systematic Creativity
By Edith Ackermann, David Gauntlett and Cecilia Weckstrom
Godtfred Kirk Kristiansen, the founding father of the LEGO® System of Play, believed that children should not be offered ready-made solutions, instead they needed something different that would strengthen their imagination and creativity. He devised the notion that a range of toys should fit together to form a system, in order to create a toy with value for life.
Over 50 years later, the LEGO brick has become part of popular consciousness, an indelible part of the childhood memories of many people the world over and a symbol for the exuberant optimism of children to imagine what could be and to create that vision with their own hands. Despite its near ubiquity as a symbol for creativity, little insight previously existed as to just why an open-ended system like the LEGO brick is such a powerful tool for creativity.
This was the mission set forth for our network of LEGO Learning Institute associated experts – to help us understand what creativity is and how play, learning and creativity are linked. Grounded in theoretical and empirical contributions, the research helps undo many existing myths on what it means—and takes—to be creative. The full research report is available for download here.
Play and Creativity
Children, we have found, learn about themselves, others and the world through play. Free play draws on curiosity and playfulness, the cornerstones of children’s creative development. Curiosity encourages children to wonder why and to seek explanations, turning the unfamiliar or strange into the familiar. Playfulness, on the other hand, encourages children to imagine what if?, to break free from habitual ways of thinking and imagine how the familiar becomes surprising and unexpected.
Whenever you think a thought unfamiliar to you, YOU are being creative. Creativity is the ability to generate ideas and artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable. When children make things (build and create), when they make things up (imagine and fantasise) and when they play make believe (doing ‘as if’ and pretending) they harness curiosity and playfulness into three different kinds of creativity: combination, exploration and transformation. Combinatorial creativity is when you combine two or more ideas or things into something new, surprising and valuable. Exploratory creativity is when you deepen your understanding by having ideas or by making something that is new, surprising and valuable. Transformational creativity occurs when a new, surprising and valuable idea or artefact you made changes the way you see the world.
Systems for Creativity
Systems are crucial for creativity. Systems of science channel creativity towards asking specific questions, and solving or problems as in maths, chemistry and engineering. Systems of art channel creativity into many different and unique expressions, giving form to our imagination, feelings and identities, as in painting, music and sculpture. LEGO offers a unique—and widely recognized—system capable of channelling both, simultaneously. With LEGO you can bridge a stream, or transport an apple from A to B (scientific creativity) or build a fantasy creature, spaceship or landscape; or create metaphorical arrangements to evoke, project and represent feelings or identities (artistic creativity).
What makes using LEGO so powerful is that when creativity occurs, it is often a mix of both scientific and artistic kinds, and being able to tap into both means we can generate alternatives and variations to our scientific experiments, or indeed artistic creations that also feature some very real functionality. We, in effect, become familiar with the entire spectrum of creativity through playing with LEGO, not only one or the other.
Playful Learning
Children learn through play and meaningful learning requires a period of open-ended ‘playing around’ with alternative ways of doing things. In playing with LEGO bricks children feel a sense of delight because they “experience in first person” how ideas emerge and get transformed through creative manipulation of systems. They invent new ways of doing or seeing something and because they are doing it themselves, they are better able to piece together how this new found insight fits with everything else they have learned earlier.
Building and experimenting is what sparks a child’s imagination and sustains her interest and engagement: you get started and ideas will come. You persevere and ideas will fly. Through using open-ended and principled materials like LEGO bricks, construction play and fantasy play can continuously feed one another, enabling us to become familiar with inventive problem-solving through the act of play.
Becoming More Creative
We are all creative and can become more so through practice. It is possible for individuals to engage their creativity systematically by cultivating the relevant mindsets behind the creative process:
• Curiosity – triggers our imagination
• Mental readiness – fuels our imagination
• Confidence – allows us to experiment with our imagination
• Positive framing – helps us see where our imagination can be useful
• Commitment – makes us willing to persevere in shaping our imagination into something new, surprising and valuable.
These five mindsets help us pursue a balance between the challenges at hand and our own abilities, between being open to new ideas and closing in on a solution, and being able to re-frame the problem and focus on seeing the world afresh, if we get stuck. By actively investing ourselves in making something, we can intuitively experiment with ideas hands on, unlocking know-how and engaging our un-conscious in new ways (minds on), leading to new, surprising and valuable ideas emerging. Lastly, learning to master a tool to think and tinker with, we can express and communicate ideas as well as explore them confidently and thoroughly. These are all essential for being creative and being self-directed in our learning.
To sum up, systematic creativity, in its simplest form is about using logic and reasoning, along with creativity and imagination, to generate ideas and artefacts that are new surprising and valuable. To be systematically creative, then, is being able to confidently engage this full spectrum through deliberate practice. Fostering the mindsets behind creativity, learning to iterate, learning to give form to our imagination and mastering a tool to think with are all essential skills part of being creative as a deliberate practice.
Much like one can listen to and appreciate music, dabble with making sounds on an instrument, play music from the score or indeed improvise or ‘jam’ with others in a band – the LEGO System works in a similar way. We can play from the ‘score’ (building instructions), or we can compose our own music or jam with others (free building alone or together).
As with music, when we build from instructions, we are already in play. When engaging in free building (constructive play), the LEGO System helps children bring their imagination to life through a process of open exploration, or intelligent form-giving. Children can engage in this alone and together with others. Only through deliberate practice does one become a master musician or a master creative. Systematically creative people therefore think creatively, reason systematically and work collaboratively.
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