Think with your hands: How to get started with Lego Serious Play (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Think with your hands: How to get started with Lego Serious Play (2013)

de.slideshare.net

36 pointsTomte14 comments

I highly recommend anyone (from about age 8+) get some Zometool construction toys, http://zometool.com https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=zometool

They’re super fun for modeling different kinds of geometrical shapes, and useful professional tools for mathematicians, physicists, chemists, architects, artists, ...

It's hard to tell what they are from the website, they look like Knex but with spherical connectors - that's not a bad thing at all, but is there more that I'm not seeing easily?

My job: help teams run more like Google and less like the IRS. That means lean, kanban, Agile, Scrum, XP, DevOps --whatever tool gets us from where we are to where we want to go.

I became interested in this a couple of years ago, and I've had the privilege since then of working with some LSP folks.

My initial thoughts are that I like this a lot as a way for strangers to get to know one another. It seems really appropriate for team kickoffs, or in cases where the team is a team -- but in name only. When it works, it's a great way to get people to stop engineering the content of what they're saying and just emotionally open up. The few times I participated, I was very impressed with how quickly strangers came together as a working team.

So my position currently is "play with it a bit and see where it might work or not". I don't see myself using this enough to get certified. I'm also not seeing how it works with already norm'ed teams, but maybe I'm missing something. Finally, like everything else in tech, there's a lot of hand-waving and over-promising. The hype cycle doesn't mean it's a bad thing. It just means you have to be careful about what's real and what's hype.

Fascinating line of thought, though.

My thoughts:

1. If you bring out LEGO while introducing yourself to a new team, you're going to seem less down to earth and approachable and more like a children's social worker.

2. I feel that hiding serious topics behind infantile representations is only going to jade your mature staff, and lead to a lack of trust as they would feel patronised and discouraged from straight and open conversation.

3. Not that I work in such an environment, but it seems like a lot of startups go for a light and playful atmosphere but end up with a very forced 'have fun... or ELSE' culture in a failed attempt to Google themselves. I feel the same failure often occurs with service industry companies trying to follow the Disney management style.

Just my two cents. For the record ping pong tables and rubik's cubes rub me the wrong way also.

Question: usually we create 2D models of sw: powerpoint, visio, a sketch on the whiteboard.

Has anyone tried lego or some other 3D construction set? Did it work? Is there anything particularly suitable to build "architecture"?

I was wondering about the same. I'm also ok with being amongst the first to try.

I wonder if I should try a "Ask HN:" post and hope to get more answers about this.

I have a feeling that legos are too "low-res" for sketching out software design. However, I use them sometimes before attempting a more detailed 3D model or illustration, to build a sort of sketch reference. I use this most when thinking about perspective, sight-lines, etc. It helps me avoid getting stuck in the minutia of my digital tools (Sketchup or Illustrator), where I can get distracted trying to make the tool do what I want.

Well if you include Lego technic, Lego is in fact Turing complete[0][1]. This means one could not only do software design, but development on Lego.

[0] http://rubens.ens-lyon.fr/fr/gallery/ [1] http://www.nico71.fr/lego-computer-digicomp/

It's a long time, but isn't this the software they build in the novel Microserfs?

If so the idea's been around a long while, so I guess it just doesn't work in real life.

It's a great geek novel anyway.

From what I remember the sw they were working on in the novel was more like a Virtual Reality lego. I.e. something like what they use in Second Life, or possibly Minecraft, but I don't remember it being aimed at modelling sw architecture. Also, by using a 3D sw you would lose the physical manipulation part, which seems to be important, according to the article linked above.

I have definitely read about a project where they made a physical model to represent/show the complexity of a software system to their clients. IIRC the project involved doing a re-write of an existing system.

Unfortunately, I can't remember exactly where I read this. Perhaps someone else here knows the details? Sorry I can't be more specific.

Moshe Safdie used “All the Lego in Montreal” to design his Habitat complex http://www.dezeen.com/2014/12/19/moshe-safdie-movie-intervie....

It is also worth mentioning that Lego makes a great mechanical prototyping medium. A big advantage is being able to quickly iterate and demonstrate something that works in the real world.

In simulation, it's easy to forget about things like friction*, deformation, slop, backlash that aren't simulated.

That being said, it is high time that someone made a mechanical construction set simulator for VR...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com