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Constructing Creativity
Mary Beth Willard
My toddler concentrates mightily, his tiny brow furrowed, his tongue poking ever so slightly out of the corner of his mouth. He fails to acknowledge my entry to the playroom, nor does he notice when I sit next to him cross-legged on the floor. His eyes lock on to each LEGO® DUPLO® square in turn as he deliberately presses them into a single layer on a flat green board. After several minutes, he looks up, startles as he notices me, and then breaks into a grin. “Mommy,” he says, “I made you a pie!”
The pie is his first LEGO creation, and my heart swells with parental pride, but I would be lying if I said that such pride had not been leavened with a tiny scoop of self-congratulation. My spouse and I had ensured that one of his first toys was LEGO DUPLO because we believe, like many parents I know, that playing with LEGO encourages creativity. And look! It works! The moment of self-congratulation passes as my son encourages me to eat the pie, because as I dutifully pretend to nom away on raspberries (red bricks), blueberries (blue bricks), and bananas (you get the pattern), I wonder why the belief that LEGO contributes to creativity is so pervasive.
Originality and Creativity
We should pause here to distinguish between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated.1 Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. My son's DUPLO pie is not original, but it is creative, in the sense that constructing it was a new idea to him, and it is in this sense that we can ask whether playing with LEGO truly contributes to creativity.
On the one hand, LEGO allegedly encourages creativity by inviting us to build whatever we can imagine; on the other hand, actual LEGO play often involves following someone else's instructions or building meticulous scale models of real-world objects. Many LEGO enthusiasts, especially adult LEGO enthusiasts, enjoy building sets, and then displaying them. In such cases, the point is not to use the bricks in new ways; the point is to carefully follow the instructions so that every piece winds up in its proper place. Following the instructions might be challenging, but it is hardly creative to follow an exacting plan laid out by someone else.
Perhaps being creative with LEGO just means setting aside the instructions and striking off solo to build one's own creations. The system of play developed by the LEGO Group is commonly hailed as having the potential to contribute mightily to a child's creative development because even though many bricks are sold as sets, all of the bricks interlock, so they can be reused over and over. Moreover, the high quality of the ABS thermoplastic used in LEGO bricks ensures that the bricks can survive generations of use; my son's pie was made of DUPLOs that used to belong to his father. LEGO Batman® snaps into place happily alongside the original LEGO astronauts, and he may even borrow their space helmets; the only limits on Batman's adventures lie in the imagination of the child.
Yet even original LEGO creations must follow the constraints that result from the physical forms of the bricks. We might think of creativity as requiring significant artistic freedom to create whatever we want, and while the LEGO bricks facilitate stacking, the interlocking studs-and-bricks constrain what is possible. Working with LEGO requires working with edges and corners; it is no surprise that many large-scale creations are pieces that are well-suited to being built out of rigid plastic: cars, boats, buildings, and so forth.
Moreover, LEGO purists insist that only products produced by the LEGO Group should be used in an authentically original LEGO creation. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation.2 Though a fan could exercise creativity while remolding LEGO, according to this line of thought, she would not be building with LEGO creatively. Rather, doing so would be creatively using LEGO as raw materials, as one might repurpose any other piece of plastic. As a result, while we often hear that playing with LEGO encourages creativity, the implicit rules of fan culture, as well as the material constraints imposed by the bricks themselves, limit significantly what may be created.
Herein lies the paradox of creativity: how can the freedom required for true creativity be compatible with a toy that comes with incredibly detailed instructions for creating specific objects, let alone with a fan culture that constrains what counts as a legitimately creative use of LEGO? Confronted with this paradox, I am cynically tempted to assume that I am nothing more than a dupe of marketing. “Creativity” perhaps means nothing more than “buy this toy, o conscientious parent; you will certainly get a lot of use out of it, and trust us, you will have more fun if you buy lots and lots of bricks.”
Madmen, Oddballs, and Visionaries
The LEGO Movie embodies this paradox, presenting three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The LEGO Movie winks knowingly at pop culture and LEGO fandom, so that I have to believe that the movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision.
Quite a lot of philosophical writing focuses on the experience of being creative as a kind of madness. The imagery is violent: we are seized by the Muse, or possessed by the Gods. The artist becomes a passive conduit as the madness works through him to produce something wholly novel.
In the Platonic dialogue Ion, Socrates likens the creativity of lyric poets, or rhapsodes, to divine possession or madness. When rhapsodes perform in front of an audience, the breath of the gods literally inspires (“breathes into”) the poets so that they become a conduit for the brilliance of the Muse.3 Centuries later, Kant argues that creativity resides in the free play of the imagination, consisting of the capacity to produce wholly original ideas. Yet, according to Kant, creativity remains mysterious to even the creative genius.4 Likewise, Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan describes creativity as coming unbidden to an artist, possessing him, and leaving him bewildered, as if coming down from a drug high, marveling at the work he has created.
In The LEGO Movie, the Master Builders depict the madness model of creativity, represented as unfettered recombination. The Master Builders work to thwart the nefarious President Business, who plans to fix all of the worlds of the LEGO universe in place with the Kragle (Krazy Glue) so that they may never again be taken apart and recombined to make new things. President Business is the bad guy; he stifles creativity because he wishes to have all of his LEGO worlds neat and tidy. Pirates sail on the ocean; citizens stay in the cityscape; the Old West never need fear an invasion by laser guns and spaceships.
The creations of the Master Builders transcend mere instructions. In psychedelic Cloud Cuckoo Land, Unikitty builds mad rainbow-colored creations and insists that there are no rules (or consistency!). The heroine Wyldstyle repeatedly saves the day by constructing elaborate vehicles out of spare parts on the fly; the movie visualizes her as seeing the exact pieces she needs in piles of discarded city bricks meant to represent junk. She is an inspired genius, and when she exhorts the citizens of Bricksburg to rebel against President Business's plan, they do so with whatever bricks they have at hand. We next see a plucky citizen attempting to insert a croissant into a steering wheel.
The second conception of creativity developed in The LEGO Movie lies with the hero Emmet, who in the early scenes devotedly follows not just instructions for building but all rules. He is a conformist. Yet the movie also suggests that the roots of creativity lie in the simple act of thinking outside the box. Emmet is an oddball, the Special with nothing special about him. Emmet's first original creation is a double-decker couch, roundly mocked by his new Master Builder friends because it does nothing more than fill a much-needed gap in conceptual space. Emmet thought outside the box, but badly. Emmet is redeemed, however. Not only does his double-decker couch, which floats, rescue his friends from the destruction of Cloud Cuckoo Land, but he eventually manages to save the day not by designing a new spaceship but by building an ordinary Octan corporation transport. His most creative moment lies not in the development of something new but in recognizing that building an ordinary ship according to the instructions is the last thing that their enemies will expect. He uses the ship design creatively, even though it is not itself a creative design.
If these were the only conceptions of creativity open to us, then clearly LEGO's claim to creativity would be nothing more than clever marketing. Madness has no aim, yet to develop one's own creation, whether it is something as simple as a DUPLO pie, as unimaginative as a double-decker couch, or as complex as Richter's Sitting Bull, with 1.75 million pieces, requires...
