Just Joshin' #111 (Building)
1 Family Photo:
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As children grow, there's a progression of age-appropriate building materials: Mega Bloks -> Duplos -> Legos.
The kids get bigger. The pieces get smaller, easier to lose, step on, and swallow.
Calvin's wanted Legos for a while. YouTube has endless playlists of Lego trains built in all shapes and sizes. We put him off with the lesser building blocks for as long as we could. Is Calvin old enough to play with Legos? Is Lawrence old enough to not eat them?
Last week, Calvin announced: "We need to go to Target and buy the Lego garbage truck." I don't know what inspired that specific impulse. Product placement in sponsored YouTube videos must be more targeted than I can imagine.
Long story short, we bought a Lego garbage truck at Target last week.
There's two types of Lego kid: there's the kid who build his kits per instructions, putting the finished pieces on their shelves like trophies. Then there's the kid who just grab handfuls of Legos and build stuff. It's the distinction between rule-followers and creatives.
It was fun watching Calvin open the box and pull out the instructions. To discover what kind of Lego kid he'd be. The 250 piece set comes in three bags, with three instruction booklets. We worked through them in order, like assembling a step-by-step jigsaw puzzle. The first instruction book is for the garbage can, then the truck, then the truck's garbage container. Lego instructions have gotten really good - we only made a few mistakes where we had to break apart pieces and flip backwards in the instructions.
Calvin was beaming when we'd finished. Rolling the garbage truck back and forth, loading and emptying the container, he asked, "Can we put it on the shelf in your office so the people at your work can see it?"
I was proud of Calvin for completing the build, and honored he wanted me to share it, but I admit I was a little let down to find out Calvin was a rule-follower Lego kid.
However the next day, before I could put the garbage truck in a place of honor, Calvin had already taken it half apart. There were pieces scattered everywhere.
"Whatcha doing?" I asked Calvin.
"I'm customizing it, Dad,"
Calvin's Lego garbage truck has been built up, disassembled, and rebuilt a dozen different ways in the past week.
Maybe there's more than two types of Lego kid.
1 Dad Joke:
Building Memories
Highlights:
Time To Build
​Quantity Always Trumps Quality by Jeff Atwood​
​It's Time to Build by Marc Andreessen​
​The Law of Recombinant Growth by Hal Varian​
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A willingness to pull things apart and reconstitute them in a new form underlies the genius of these inventors.
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Once one inventor proves something can be done, hundreds of others attempt to improve upon the invention.
​How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand (Derek Sivers Notes)​
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Buildings shouldn't look exactly like their models. That's when people knew the least about what's really needed.
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Architects think of a building as a thing. Builders think of it as a sequence.
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Design decisions will keep happening through the whole process, permissions, site preparation, construction, finishing, inhabitation.
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Find things that don't work, and try things that might not work. By failing small, early, and often, it can succeed long and large.
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We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.
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Josh Knox
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