I’m talking a little more about this stuff tomorrow at SCMS, but one thing I found provocative about Appadurai’s work is his claim that design is one of the primary forces of social order. He argues that we can’t talk about any object as simply a thing. (A tree might be a thing, but a tree brought into the orbit of social life– trees cut, painted, pruned– becomes a designed thing.) What’s more, he claims that ordinary humans are designers of social forms that define and reproduce the everyday (ie, it is by design that we choose how to spend our energies, we design our time and our day, always against constraints, but we engage every day in deploying our resources, ideas, bodies in order to accomplish goals and to aspire.) “Professional design” (i.e., LEGO designers, web designers, interior designers) takes place against this social ground and becomes connected to markets, money, and merchandising. And, as you point out, gender scripts come into play in the process.

Anyway, whoa. There’s a lot here that I haven’t worked out, but like I said, I find it provocative and think it could be of use in media studies… perhaps even beyond production design. My interest comes from looking for alternatives to STS concepts like actor network theory, which is useful but not as media and cultural studies friendly as it could be.

I’d love to hear more about this distinction between following instructions and having a plan, as you’re right that design deserves more attention here. At a production level, LEGO calls the folks it employs to come up with ideas for playsets “LEGO Designers,” and in their promotional videos and such, that term seems to carry capital beyond a simple job title. I’m curious though where you see the design of an object or system ending. It clearly seems like design to come up with the system of interlocking bricks and the function of LEGO bricks to be reconfigurable in different ways (ie, designing the LEGO system). Is it also “design” to develop a singular plan for how LEGO bricks could be made into a Batmobile object? Ultimately, I think what I’m asking is whether there is a big difference between construction of an “object” or construction of a “system”–and maybe media studies’ emphasis on authorship has been because of an emphasis on texts as the former.

Though to call out one place where we do talk about design in media studies (and a topic featured in our collection) is production design, and more broadly the design of worlds in which stories can unfold. I think this is a potential productive link between film studies and digital media studies.

And as much as this point might suggest otherwise, I’m not trying to decry LEGO’s embrace of instructions compared to the mythical “basic bucket of bricks” we all seem to remember from our childhood. I love being shown how to build Batmobiles and the like, and I think that there is something to be said about learning building techniques that you can apply elsewhere by following the instructions LEGO provides. But it’s where those scripts intersect with gender scripts that I start getting worried.

Thanks!

You note that these arguments (about male heroes, “magical negros,” the mundane, normativity, etc.) provide an “excellent platform for continuing to think about LEGO, the idea of ‘creativity,’ and the unequal extension of that idea to different consumer groups.”Agreed! I just wanted to throw one more keyword out there that I think is useful (and under-utilized in media studies), which doesn’t come up in your post. You talk about creativity, modularity, building, play… but you don’t mention design. The trusty wikipedia entry for design begins: “Design is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system.” And this is the distinction I saw at work in the Lego movie: there is a big difference between “following instructions” and “having a plan.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately in terms of bridging the fields of STS, media and communication studies (great new collection by Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot, btw: “Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society”) http://www.amazon.com/Media-Technologies-Communication-Materiality-Technology/dp/0262525372

You and Jonathan have a wonderful collection on media authorship. This seems to be the favored term to talk about media creation. Design doesn’t come up often come up in media studies. I just wanted to urge more of us to consider this a little more deeply (Shameless plug: I’m presenting on similar themes at SCMS in Seattle, SAT 5PM w/ 3 other great presenters– Michael Newman, William Boddy, and Andrew Bottomley– come! Session Q8, Room8)

Design offers “scripts” (like gender) too; it’s never “ideologically neutral” even if mid-century modernists once claimed that certain typefaces (Helvetica!) could be.

Anyway, great post and I look forward to seeing you in Seattle.

P.S. You don’t exactly apologize for bringing these arguments to the table a month later (thankfully!) but as I said in a comment to Germaine’s post that I made 3 weeks after the fact (http://blog.commarts.wisc.edu/2014/02/24/a-look-back-at-what-exactly/comment-page-1/#comment-428998), I want to claim a slow food movement for the internet. I called it “slow news” in that comment, but I’ve got a better term: slow feed. Nothing wrong with taking time to pause and reflect instead of racing to be first!