ia play

I had the opportunity last week to attend a brilliant course called An Introduction to Visual Methods.

“The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a step-change career enhancing skills in visual methods; and to provide an ongoing and integrated visual methods resource for researchers with experience in visual methods at intermediate level that is stimulating, challenging and grounded in ‘best practice’.”

Dr Jon Prosser and friends are running an ESRC funded initiative to “build visual method capacity across the social sciences. Part of the initiative was these dirt cheap training courses, aimed at academic and non-academic researchers alike.

The two days involved three hands-on activities and a number of presentations covering:

• Katherine Davies : photo elicitation and family tree drawing to explore family resemblances and sibling relationships
• Stuart Muir: video diaries to explore contemporary rituals
• Rob Walker on children’s photo diaries
• Andrew Clark on map making and walkabouts to understand urban social geography
• Tessa Muncey on auto-ethnography through writing and photos
• David Gauntlett: making documentaries with kids, drawings of celebrities, identity models made of Lego
• Steve Higgins: using cartoon templates to find out childrens views
• Ruth Holliday: using video diaries to explore gender identity
• Jon Prosser on the ethics of visual methods.

There’s a Visual Methods Symposium in July that will explore some of these themes in more depth.

DG’s video of Media & Everyday Life represents big media with pictures of the ecclesiastical Broadcasting House. Not sure what David would think of our BBC building, the Broadcast Centre. It looks more like a warehouse than a church. And White City building looks a bit like it should be in Gotham City.

Lego features, of course, in the form of Lego gardens (combining two of my favourite things!) to show the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

And towards the end David talks about Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman and his theory that craftsmanship gives a sense of well-being. The Craftsman has been on my wishlist for a while and I’m having to fight the urge to go on a book buying splurge.

Lego wind turbines

“The public’s imagination will be captured by participating in the construction of over 3,500 LEGO bricks to form a fully functioning three-metre tall wind turbine!”

Might help us meet our new EU targets for renewable energy.

Lego we are hopefully all familiar with.

But Lego Serious Play? Sounds a bit contrary but as The Science of Lego Serious Play says “play is usually fun, it is seldom, if ever, frivolous”.

Lego Serious Play is a consultancy method from the Lego group that gets participants to build metaphors of their organisational identities and experiences using Lego bricks and then work through imaginary scenarios.

It is based on the concept that when we “think with objects” or “think through our fingers” we tap into ways of thinking that most adults have not used since childhood.

The method builds on theories of constructivist learning and the idea that when people construct things out in the world, they simultaneously construct theories and knowledge in their minds. By building Lego metaphors participants can make abstract ideas and relationships more more tangible, and therefore more readily understandable.

Would love to give it a go…

I’m back from swanning around Crete and the admin/HR nightmare that is June is mostly complete. So I’ve signed myself up to a new project. One of those really meaty interesting projects that just happens to interest all of the political heavyweights in the organisation. I’m very very happy to be getting my teeth into the project but slightly nauseous at the thought of all the politics, positioning and general unpleasantness.

On the way home I was just reminded by David Gauntlett’s Creative Explorations (more on that later) that Lego is a contraction of the Danish phrase“Leg Godt,” which means “Play Well.”

So that’s the challenge. How do you get everyone to play well?