LEGO vs. Universal Design
Gender-specific toys are the wrong model for engineering curricula.
By Debbie Chachra
If you’ve been in a toy store recently, you may have noticed that LEGO has a new line of toys called LEGO Friends. In the early 2000s, LEGO was in trouble: Sales were down, and a succession of money-losing missteps had pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy. It brought in a new CEO and launched a major global research project to understand how children play. One of the findings was that boys preferred toys with strong narratives, while girls were more likely to enjoy role playing. Accordingly, LEGO designed the Friends line for girls: larger figures, a range of settings, and a pink, purple, and teal color scheme. By all accounts, it’s been a success.
Unless you’ve spent time with LEGO in the past few years, you might be thinking, “But LEGO is for boys and girls — why do they need a special toy for girls?” Part of the answer is that the regular LEGO kits are primarily aimed at boys — this is clear from who’s shown playing with them on the packaging, and by how risibly hard it is to find female mini-figures in the kits. It’s also reflected in market research about what toys boys and girls want as gifts.
But what if you’re a girl who likes building things around a story, and not role playing? My strongest memory of playing with LEGO as a young girl is trying to build the TARDIS from the Doctor Who television show, which is completely in line with how boys play, not how girls play. By conflating styles of play so strongly with gender, LEGO has made it even harder for girls who like narrative-driven play to buy the mainline LEGO. And never mind how hard it must be to be a boy who wants to role-play with LEGO — the “girls’ LEGO” is even more socially off limits for young boys than the boys’ is for girls.
Why does this matter to me as an engineering educator? It illustrates an important point in understanding, and designing for, a range of student experiences. Demographic differences, such as gender, among engineering students don’t necessarily mean that we need to design different experiences for each group (the LEGO approach). Rather, any observed differences between genders are telling us that we have an axis along which the student experience varies; what we need to do, then, is design educational experiences that work for students along the entire axis.
I think of this as an example of the “universal design” principle: providing accomodations for people with mobility or other differences (as mandated by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and similar legislation elsewhere) makes things better for everyone. Dropped curbs are probably the best-known example: Along with accommodating wheelchairs, they ease passage for strollers, hand carts, skates, crutches, and more.
This doesn’t, of course, preclude creating experiences and support structures targeted toward under-represented groups in engineering programs. In fact, learning experiences that work better for underserved students are likely to be better for a wide range of their peers.
There is still a place for gender-specific design, of course. The kind of deep research that LEGO conducted on children’s play would be useful, for instance, in creating medical devices. At least two artificial hearts have been brought to market in sizes that fit a large majority of men but a small minority of women (for whom heart disease is a leading cause of death). There’s clearly a need to develop artificial hearts that specifically fit women.
But in educating our future engineers, we need to take the whole spectrum of students into account. That means becoming fully aware of their differences and use that knowledge to design better educational experiences for everyone – including those whom a toymaker’s marketing strategy may never have reached.
Debbie Chachra is an associate professor of materials science at Olin College. She can be reached at debbie.chachra@olin.edu or on Twitter as @debcha.