Lego and the Journey

Lego is brilliant, but the act of separating each individual type of brick into its own specific container is a Sisyphean task conducted by only one person in our house (not me).

A new app called Brickit will scan your lego pieces to create an inventory of your collection. This includes counting the total number of bricks, as well as sorting them by size. All you have to do is spread them out on a flat surface and take a photograph, and the app will suggest different figures you can build using the bricks in your collection, including step-by-step directions.

Does this take away from the ‘play’ or imagination so implicit in Lego? Almost definitely. There’s an interesting point here – that in making something more ‘efficient’ we absolutely lose all the pleasure. As Rory Sutherland has suggested, perhaps there should be a setting in my Waze GPS app which allows me to pick the more pleasurable journey somewhere, rather than just the quickest/shortest.

Sometimes the journey quite literally is more important than the destination, and efficiency is rarely the best measure of success of an experience. 

It’s interesting to think about when considering online shops – we can measure a conversion rate, but how do we measure what we made the customer feel? Was the sale efficient or was it pleasurable? Is this either/or? Customer experience in a shop can be managed by the staff – in a restaurant if I’m made to feel like I’ve made the correct wine choice I’m sure the wine tastes better. 

How can we emulate that on a website?