29th September 2025

The aim of this workshop was to use Lego blocks in a way to help us think about serious topics in a bit of an unserious way. Often times as an animator, my ways of thinking is either through drawings or through words, so being having to think in 3 dimension and limited pieces really challenged the way I thought about the topic I was trying to create and how I could express my thoughts on it.

The first thing Andrew got us to create was to individually express the word “Rasgarasga”. Of course, none of us had any clue what ‘Rasgarasga’ was or whether it was a real word thus it was left to our imagination.

When I thought of Rasgarasga I immediately thought of the words ‘reggae’ and ‘rasta’, which was perhaps a reflection of me as I had grown up around a Jamaican community. Thus I created a scenic beach with rasta coloured trees.

(image here)

Upon putting together our Rasgarasga sculptures, it was interesting to see where everyone’s minds had gone to. Some people had dove in headfirst to make up a story of what Rasgarasga meant to them whereas some seemed a bit worried about getting it wrong. The fact that none of us knew who was ‘right’ made it easy for us to put our pieces together.

(Image here)

Looking around at other groups, many people had created very elaborate stories on what Rasgarasga was- from wars to cults. I think it let people channel creativity in a way that we usually cannot when given a specific brief to follow.

In the end, it turned out that Rasgarasga was in fact a Spanish jazz band who’s music we had been listening to the entire time!

Another task we had was to list out the 6 elements that made good team, as a group we listed:

• Communication
• Respect
• Open-mindedness
• Compromise
• Decisiveness
• (the last thing)
• Magic

We received some skepticism on ‘decisiveness in particular, as Andrew believed that it clashed with other elements such as ‘compromise’. The way we saw it, decisiveness was a necessary part of any group decision making process. Compromise in extremes in just as bad as decisiveness in extremes, balance was the magic.

When making our elements, we split them one each. I chose open-mindedness as I wanted create a sculpture of a whole world coming from the little lego man’s head. Togther, I think our teamwork diorama looked really good.

(images here)

Now we knew what was good for teamwork, we could think about what didn’t go so well. At first we thought about issues we had all had working on projects with others before turning to mirror onto ourselves. While I find group projects much more motivating than working alone, reflecting on my last few projects I think I have a tendency to put too much on myself without asking for help. My lego depiction of that is supposed to mimic a calendar where it’s good at the start but near the end it breaks down a bit.

(image)

Overall Takeaway:

Using Lego as ‘serious play’ to explore topics in a relaxed way.

• Rasgarasga band
• Meeting new people from Games Art
• The 6 elements of working with other people well
  • Open-mindedness, Communication, Respect, Compromise, Decisiveness… magic!
• What am I bad at when it comes to working with people
  • Over estimating my abilities and not asking for help
• Overall takeaway
• Need to add photographs