Lego Bricks and the Stories We Build By
I just read Jeremy Kun's great piece about math and storytelling. In it, he talks about ways he found to engage kids in math and other learning by telling stories, mostly adventure stories. It turns out that math is learned best as a story, at least when you're very young.
I have found something similar to be true when it comes to building.
Some years ago, Stripe co-founder John Collison tweeted an epiphany: "The world is a museum of passion projects."
I think there’s another way to say it, more general if not more eloquent. Everything built embodies a story, and it's not just the story of the people who conceived it.
Each building and object is a story in itself, in how its internal parts relate to each other, and how they touch the rest of the world; e.g. the humans who use a building.
This really hit me while I was watching my 6 year old son play with Legos. He loves stories, loves being read to, and when he builds with Legos, he places each new brick into a building or vehicle with an explanation of what it contributes and how it will be useful to the figurines who inhabit them.
The bricks are stuck together with explanations as much as they are by the friction and the interlock of their studs. That is, the subcomponents of an object relate to each other much as the elements of story do. Wall and roof and window and door, each with its purpose, constraints and repercussions on the surround.
In a conversation later, a friend who is smart about user interfaces made me see that this is what design is. He showed me that the objects' stories change after the object is built, as the human users bring new needs and expectations and explanations to objects. Just like readers rewrite any book that writers give them.
Every thing finds its identity in the way it relates to its larger environment. Each object is its Gestalt, and the Gestalt changes over time.
Sidenote: Some of the smartest people I know have a trick they do with narrative.
I used to work with a team of great AI engineers. Anytime I had a question about how an algorithm worked, I'd go to one of them to ask for an explanation. And he'd become the algorithm. He would shrink himself to a microscopic conceptual level, and imagine himself walking through the decision points to explain how the world looked to the algorithm from a first-person point of view. He'd identify with the algorithm, which is a big part of story. I also think this can be done to cross in gap in scale; for example, also macroscopically, to tell the story of the universe.
Now I want to make an even bigger claim, and begin by noting that many stories tell us how to overcome a problem; man vs nature, etc. Such a function surely served an evolutionary purpose: The better we told stories of problems solved, the more likely we were to survive. Somehow this function of overcoming and problem solving is embedded in language itself.
Language sees the world as a problem to be solved. In his book “Seeing Like a State”, James Scott showed that states try to make society legible in order to control and administer them, sometimes adopting standardized perspectives that obscured social complexities. They engaged in a form of data compression that led to interpretive distortion. And I guess my intuition is that language is like that. It makes life legible by being particularly good at expressing conflict and overcoming.
Which is why we remember stories so well, why they help us make sense of the world we build. They encode the world in a way that just might help us stay alive.