Grid Builder Lab: Recap
For a few years running, the EnergyTech VA conference has been one of my favorite weeks on the calendar. It is put on by friends, and this past March it was the biggest year yet, hosted at the Science Museum of Virginia. When the organizers asked me to run an afternoon social session to keep people engaged as the day wound down, the answer turned out to be LEGO.
The ask came back before Christmas. The organizers wanted something for the late afternoon: an activity with enough draw to keep people in the building as the formal sessions thinned out. A friend who knew about the LEGO MOC design rabbit hole I'd fallen into over the last several years suggested a LEGO angle, and the more we talked it through, the more obvious it became.
We opened with a short talk, about fifteen minutes, where I made a case I'd been turning over for a while: that our industry has a real aesthetic gap, that the infrastructure we build is genuinely worth looking at and almost never presented that way, and that LEGO is a legitimate artistic medium for closing that gap. It was a good crowd to test the theory on. More than seventy people turned up, enough that the pitch competition next door let us know, with good humor, that we'd drawn off their audience.
From there the room turned over to building for the next two hours. I'd brought roughly ten thousand bricks, pre-sorted and laid out, making up about two dozen models. Most were designs of my own, rounded out with a few good builds from the wider MOC community so there was plenty of range to work from.
Participants could work either way. Grab one of the pre-printed instruction booklets and follow a model start to finish, or skip the booklets entirely and build whatever they wanted from the sorted bins. Plenty of people did both. There was coffee, and there were cookies, which never hurts.
People stayed, and they built, and the feedback, about the session and about the medium itself, was more encouraging than I'd expected. That afternoon is a good part of the reason this project exists in the form it does now. It was the proof I'd been looking for that the idea has legs, and the push I needed to pour real creative energy into it.