I like to make a distinction between imagination and creativity that you may or may not agree with. Imagination is the ability to see known possibilities as being reachable from a situation. Creativity is the ability to manufacture new possibilities out of a situation. The two form a continuous spectrum of regimes in simple cases, but are disconnected in complex cases.
I’ve been playing with Legos in open-play mode lately to try and develop better intuitions about both. I’m limiting myself to a set of rectangular blocks on a base plate for now. I’m afraid so far the results are terrible.
I can follow fairly complex instructions to build models from a kit pretty easily, but faced with a pile of bricks and no plans or goals, I come up with dull designs to build, exhibiting very little imagination and near-zero creativity. Nothing in this collage gets even a passing grade on creativity. The most imaginative thing in the collage below is the model of a FinFET — a nano-scale feature of semiconductor chips — at the bottom left. I give it a D+ on imagination because it took a minor leap of imagination to recognize that Legos can be used to model things at scales besides the familiar range of scales covered by Lego models (typically coffee-cup scale to cityscape scale). I had to let go the “habit” of only seeing normal-scale-range design possibilities. But even that minor, barely passing-grade leap felt exciting. I plan to pull out my copy of Open Circuits and model more tiny electronics parts and features.
Just to give you a sense of how pedestrian these are, consider this dragon model with 6500-7000 parts by an expert Lego builder, Donny Chen (who also designed a playable grand piano that became an official kit).
This dragon, unlike the far simpler dragon kits sold by Lego itself, uses a 2×4 oval tile for scales and a set of other parts for creating the curving spine, all from mostly unrelated kits. It’s very hard to get Lego parts to do static curves, since the grammar has a strong orthonormal bias due to the mating technique. Chen managed to pull it off:
“The dragon I promised for the Year of the Dragon—maybe a bit bigger than a bunny, LOL! I kicked off this project about a year back, right after Brickvention2023, and I’ve been working at it on and off. Started building it about a month ago, and I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. No strings, no wires, not a drop of glue, not even a flexible tube, all solid connections. It stretches a solid 2 meters when fully spread out, around 1300 scales and made up of 6500-7000 pieces.”
Chen’s design exhibits way more of both imagination and creativity than anything I’ve ever made up in any physical construction medium. He has clearly mastered Lego to the point where working forwards from the possibilities of a set of parts, and backwards from the constraints of a vision, are part of a near-unconscious fluency in the medium. But I can dimly see radically advanced versions of my own primitive pidgin Lego compositions in Chen’s process as described in the linked video. I’m at least at conscious incompetence in the Lego medium and language. I’m aware of my own decided lack of creativity and imagination. Chen is clearly at some advanced level of unconscious competence on the shuhari developmental curve that I’ll never come close to.
Keeping Lego in mind as a reference example, what can we say about imagination versus creativity? Here’s my theory.
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