Playing Lego with a Different Perspective

Around January this year, I joined a very unique event called Lego Serious Mapping. It wasn’t just a casual lego play session, but a facilitated workshop led by Lyla Sulaiman, a certified facilitator, in collaboration with Service Design Indonesia. The first batch was held at the end of 2025, but I only managed to join on the second batch, which was intentionally kept small and intimate.

The event was held at a charming little library in Tebet called “Baca dari Tebet”, a cozy space filled with books and a large table in the middle where we gathered. There were supposed to be six selected participants, but on the day of the event the weather turned quite bad. It rained before the session started, and in the end only five of us made it: me, Attaya, Dina, Sarah, and Ija, with Kak Lyla as the facilitator. The small group actually made the atmosphere feel more personal and safe to share.

What We Did During the Session

Throughout the session, we went through several stages that slowly shifted our perspective on what “playing lego” could mean:

1. Introduction to Lego Serious Mapping We started by understanding what Lego Serious Mapping is a facilitation method that uses lego as a tool to map ideas, plans, and even life journeys in a visual and tangible way.

1. Warm-up: Representing Ourselves with Lego As a warm-up, we were asked to build simple lego shapes that represented ourselves. It sounded easy, but it pushed us to pause and reflect: Who am I? How do I see myself? How do I want to be seen? Those answers then turned into small structures made of bricks and pieces.

1. Mapping Our One-Year Agenda
2. Next, we moved into a more serious phase: mapping our plans for the next twelve months.
3. We broke the year down into quarters and used lego to visualize:
4. What we wanted to achieve
5. What we expected to happen
6. What kind of journey we imagined for ourselves
7. The table slowly turned into a landscape of personal roadmaps, each one unique, but all made from the same small bricks.

1. Identifying Potential Obstacles
2. After building our agendas, we were guided to think about possible obstacles:
3. What might get in the way of these plans?
4. How big is the impact of each obstacle?
5. What will we do if those obstacles really appear?
6. We built representations of these challenges using lego too. Suddenly, the bricks were no longer just “objects to build with”, but symbols of our fears, limitations, and external factors that we usually only keep in our minds.

1. Voting on the Most Influential Obstacles Then we did a voting session to decide which obstacles felt most impactful across everyone’s plans. It was interesting to see how some of our struggles intersected: things like self-doubt, time management, workload, or life transitions. In that moment, we realized that many of our worries are not only personal, but also shared.

1. Making the Plans More Concrete In the final part of the exercise, we were asked to rewrite and reorganize all the plans we had built with lego so they became more concrete and actionable. From something that started as a “playful activity”, the session slowly transformed our ideas into clearer, structured plans that we could actually bring into our daily lives.

The Power of Storytelling and Listening

For me, the most unique and powerful part of the event was the storytelling session. One by one, we took turns explaining:

1. The story behind our lego models
2. The agendas we had for the year
3. The reasons why those goals mattered to us

The others listened, asked questions, and gave feedback always in a constructive and encouraging way. Without realizing it, the space became a kind of group reflection session. We weren’t just talking about lego or plans, we were also sharing parts of ourselves that we might not usually say out loud. In a gentle and indirect way, it felt like releasing some emotional weight we had been carrying quietly.

Seeing Lego in a New Way

Before this event, playing lego for me was always about building things:

houses, vehicles, objects, characters or solving a puzzle to make sure the final result matched an image or instruction.

Through Lego Serious Mapping, that idea changed completely. Lego became:

1. A medium to reflect on myself
2. A tool to visualize my future
3. A safe way to talk about fears and obstacles
4. A bridge between imagination and structured planning

Playing lego suddenly had depth every brick had a meaning, every structure had a story. It wasn’t just about “finishing a build”, but about understanding myself better and making my intentions for the future more visible and tangible.

Closing the Session

At the end of the event, we each shared a short testimonial and offered feedback about the session. We wrapped up, took a few photos, and then slowly went our separate ways back to our own routines and lives.

Even so, that afternoon stayed with me. The people, the stories, the quiet sound of lego bricks being clicked together, and the feeling of turning something as simple as a toy into a serious tool for reflection and planning.

Hopefully, one day, our paths will cross again maybe in another Lego Serious Mapping session, or in a different kind of space where we can look back and say:

“These are the things I built after that day, not just with lego, but with my life.”