I remember when I was young, I always had a habit for venturing into my dad's or my grandad's sheds and simply helping myself to the various instruments of tooling and then finding whatever scrap (at least I thought it was) pieces of wood I could find and start banging, sawing, cutting, twisting and dimembering away.
The problem was, it never amounted to anything other than a sound thrashing based on the mess I created. Though it never stopped me, my parents decided to do something about it and introduced me to many marvels that would carve out my future.
These included Lego sets, young woodwork sets (nothing like them these days!), small construction toys and the king of them all....Meccano!
My grandad tells me that when I was 5 or 6 I was determined to become an undertaker due to my fascination with the wrestler of the same name and my habit of cutting up wood. Once I came into contact with Meccano, I soon learned I wanted to do something else!
The sheer simplicity, uniformality and standardised design of the sets left infinite amounts of creative space for the young engineers of the days. Similar to Lego; almost any piece could be bolted to another piece using the small nuts and bolts and spanners. It paved the way for any young boy who would look at a huge piece of engineering genius and thought how wonderful it would be to be involved in such a spectacle.
The pieces were so simple and yet so diverse because of the range in lengths and shapes. Hours would be spent every day tightening the bolts, adding sections, improving structural integrity, re-thinking the counterbalance I put on the crane model, trying to make a stronger suspension bridge using fewer parts... it filled me with so much joy and kept me fascinated in a way that I haven't experienced since.
I'm saddened when I see the Meccano on offer today as it is nothing by comparison. The original sets, up until the mid-90s, used standard components that left the creativity up to the budding builder. Today, however, the sets that are available give you fewer parts, more custom parts for the particular model and lesser creative control. I remember getting a set with nearly 200 parts in it one Christmas, and I could create whatever I want from it. The sets available in the shops today can contain fewer than 60 parts and are usually designed to result in a specific end product with only minore variations.
Young boys (and girls!) are not being given the creative space that they so deserve. Tony Blair banged on about "Education, education, education!" That's all well and good, but the future generations of the world are being dumbed down and spoon fed everything and their imaginations are not being given the room to expand and to absorb the educations being offered to them. Lego is exactly the same. I used to have boxes under my bed filled with hundreds upon hundreds of Lego blocks and I would carve a masterpiece of geniusness from them. Today, everything is being simplified and including specialist parts for particular sets and so the young designers have to follow strict rules to build a finished model.
If you want the future designers and engineers of the world to continuously create brilliant pieces of work then everything has to go back to basics.
Design principles can be taught and so can the science behind engineering. Creativity is something that an individual person develops themselves and cannot be taught. You can give them lessons on how to be more creative and open up their minds but you can't simply take someone into a room and teach them creativity. It is an individual quality unique to each person.
To get someone on the path of creativity in the design, architecture and engineering world they need something like good old fashioned meccano. With something so simple, anyone can begin the build and come up woth concepts that can then be worked at at a further level. They aren't restricted by things like regulations, standard parts, things that aren't immediatley available to them... they are simply coming up with an answer to a problem that they can then develop into feasible solutions.
To conclude on my rant, I strongly believe that the simplest of tools available can help anyone realise their ideas as reailty in simple forms. The designers of the future need to be given the simple building blocks of Meccano and Lego as a starting point to build and develop their ideas. In order to move forward we need to step back and use the simple things that work!
