Outside, Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx plus dog are immortalised in a city square statue. Even my hotel bedroom - an entertaining design cocktail of nightclub-chic-meets-comicbook-jokery – included a portrait of Dennis the Menace, framed by purple and charcoal furnishings. The ubiquity of references to creations from its long-established publishing house D C Thomson, parent of the Beano and Dandy, make this apparent. While corners of the city seem careworn, it still seemed to me that Dundee is a city that likes to play. This is illustrated in its ambitious waterfront development, where Captain Scott’s ship RSS Discovery nestles on the water, up against the monumental angles of the V&A. Dundee is in regeneration the historic juxtaposed with the new and the established with the emergent. There were clear signs also of cohabitation and co-location of design, if not of co-design in a purist sense. I had the chance to explore the city a little before the events and found evidence of play, creativity and co-design all around me. Dundee: a city permeated by playĪ misperception of play – LEGO ®-based or otherwise – is that it is separate from work, or other aspects of life. While I explore the relevance of this combination and touch on specific examples of co-design I leave it to you as reader to think about how this exploration may relate to your own experience.
I reflect on this experience here, intermingling thoughts about co-design and play and how these come together through the use of LEGO ®-based approaches. The reasons for my trip were to speak on creativity, play and co-design at their annual learning and teaching conference and to run a workshop on co-design and creativity using LEGO ® in the newly opened V&A Dundee. In October 2018 I was delighted to make my first visit to Dundee, at the invitation of Abertay University. The author concludes by pulling together the commonalities between play, LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ® and co-design.
She also revisits her work with Stephen Brookfield on creative, critical reflection (2014) and relates this to the reflective practices embodied in the LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ® method. The author’s reflections on this particular event are rooted in, and distilled from, her wider work using LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ® and with play and creativity more generally. Its aim is to offer a discussion of co-design and play, a workshop outline, and observations on how LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®, co-design and play and creativity inter-relate. This paper is the ‘ruminating narrative’ of a recent workshop exploring co-design using LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ®. Cite as: James, A.(2018), "Co-Design And Co-construction: LEGO ®-Based Approaches For Complex, Creative Learning", International Journal of Management and Applied Research, Vol.
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