Joining Dots That Aren't There

Creativity is about making connections between seemingly unrelated things, and forming new concepts from the combinations, but it is also about identifying gaps that need unique solutions. What can we learn from the possibilities and limitations of Lego?

I have written here a few times about Lego and make no apologies for doing so again. Because despite what Forrest Gump contended, life isn't like a box of chocolates, it's like a box of Lego, a much more varied and useful metaphor for many things in life. With a box of chocolates if you get one you don't like then you either suffer or throw it back. But with Lego you can use it to create something else. You put it to one side and pick out another, and another. And eventually you start to see what you can do with them. It's about joining the dots, connecting them in different ways to draw different pictures. But true creativity is even more than that. It's about joining dots that aren't even there. It's about imagining that if there was a dot, or a Lego piece, that could do a certain thing, then you'd be able to create something innovative. So you look for the piece and if it truly doesn't exist then you create that first.

True creativity is about joining dots that aren't even there

Sometimes, when building with Lego, you don't even know exactly what you want to make when you start. You may have a rough idea; a car, an aeroplane, a robot; and so the first stage is to pull relevant bricks out of the box. Anything that might be useful. This is what Forrest Gump was doing wrong with his life. He was always in the right place at the right time, but by chance, not design. He just ran (and ran) with whatever chocolate he got. The true secret to being in the right place at the right time is to find the right place, and to wait. And even this only works if you've collected all the pieces you're going to need.

The company that I have been with for the last 18 years, Plasan, is also pretty good at collecting up pieces that it believes it will find useful, even when it is not necessarily 100% sure at first what it's going to do with them. We bought the automotive division of Vermont Composites (and turned it into Plasan Carbon Composites), we acquired an engineering company called KaZaK that specialised in advanced pultrusions, we brought in FEA/simulation experts, and recently entered a partnership with autonomous vehicle company, StreetDrone, and all of these elements are interesting pieces to a vision that wasn't fully formed when we pulled them out of the box. I was once one of those pieces. I have been told that when I originally came for an interview, the CEO Dani Ziv said to the head of the still young vehicle department, "I'm not sure what we're going to do with him but I want him here". It was a brave move from a small armour company not yet actually making vehicles to hire a car designer. And from me too, Plasan was on the periphery of where I saw myself, I initially saw Plasan as a potentially useful piece for my career but I wasn't certain precisely what I'd do with it. After we'd created our first vehicle though, the M1114GR, I remember standing by it proudly with Dani and rather arrogantly saying to him "when you hired me I bet you didn't think we'd do stuff like this", only for him to knock me down with "you're wrong. And we haven't even got started yet". Because Dani is very good at seeing things that aren't yet there, at joining the dots. So much creativity is grounded in this, in the ability to see connections between disparate things, to being able to take ideas or solutions from one discipline and see how when combined with those from another, a third new thing can be created. And those who are really good at it, can see the dots that aren't there, and create those too.

The true secret to being in the right place at the right time is to find the right place, and to wait

Last week I had an interesting exchange with Fifth Gear's Jonny Smith about the new Lego Fiat 500 set. I love it, and Tweeted as much, but Jonny took objection to the unique specialist parts that had been necessary to approximate the curves of the classic 500 design. His attitude is that if they're going to make special parts to let you build a model of a Fiat 500 then why wouldn't you rather go all the way and get a Tamiya model that at least looks entirely realistic when assembled. To a certain level I agree. I do prefer generic Lego pieces to more speciality ones, and share his love of Tamiya, but the two toys, (dare I call them that in this context?), serve different purposes. Another plastic kit manufacturer, Airfix, has a range of Lego-compatible kits called Quick-Build that create fairly realistic looking but simple models made almost entirely from unique pieces that happen to click together with Lego-compatible studs. Now this I really don't see the point of. Because the whole idea of Lego is the ability to build different things from the same pieces, and with all of the creativity in the world, you're not going to make anything but a VW Beetle from a great big brick shaped like a Beetle's bonnet and another that looks like its door.

By contrast, as a kid, when I got the Lego Technic fork-lift set, I didn't just see a fork-lift. I saw a half-track, I saw a dragster, I saw a conveyor belt. The beauty of Lego is the ability to build very different things from the same pieces - it's about vision and creativity. I never objected to being given a Lego set that I already had because it wasn't about the fire engine, it was about adding to your collection of pieces, mostly with simply more of the same standard pieces, and occasionally with some additional speciality pieces. The Fiat 500 model is the same. It actually makes exceptional use of standard pieces to recreate a very Lego-unfriendly shape. It is overwhelmingly built from common bricks, with the addition of some special parts that can easily be applied to build other things.

I used to love the challenge of looking for new applications for a speciality piece like the Technic differential gearset. And I also used to love trying to find a solution to fill a gap that Lego didn't have an answer for. Back in the 1980s there were many. Oh what I would have given for a ball-joint. I could picture pieces that I needed, but that Lego simply didn't make, and would spend hours, days, sometimes weeks, trying to find a workaround using the then still relatively small pool of standard pieces. That taught me many things, including the resourcefulness of making do with what you have, but also the opposite - the ability to identify when you really can't, and to be able to see exactly what it is that you're lacking. Because when you know that, you can look for it elsewhere, or create it yourself.

Take a solution from one field and use it to do something maybe quite different in another

This doesn't just apply to the tangible things, it is perhaps a more valuable lesson in the abstract. Do you see ideas or concepts only in their original context or do you have the vision to see how they could be applied elsewhere, and combined with others to create something new? Can you take a solution from one field and use it to do something maybe quite different in another? Do you join the dots and can you identify the gaps where a dot should be?

It is often said that success is 90% about identifying opportunities. The proactive way to do that is to start by collecting up useful pieces, even before you can fully visualise the opportunity. You don't necessarily need to assemble the whole picture but if you can identify a piece that's lacking and to create something to fill that need, then you have made yourself into someone else's useful piece.

If you are a creative person working in a creative field, then your life should be all about making innovative use of what exists, and creating what doesn't. The life of the creative is a box of Lego, not a box of chocolates.

Nir Kahn is the Director of Design for Plasan and has been responsible for vehicle design in the company for over 18 years, including the design of the Navistar MaxxPro MRAP, Oshkosh M-ATV, and the Plasan SandCat and Yagu. He is working on new composite architectures for the cost-effective mass-production of lightweight cars.