“With a bucket of Lego, you can tell any story. You can build an airplane or a dragon or a pirate ship – it’s whatever you can imagine.” -Christopher Miller
What I Learned From Playing With Blocks
Perhaps the most memorable shared generational memory is of building unique LEGO creations one block at a time.
In fact, I still have vivid recollection of spending many languid Saturday afternoons as an 8-year-old sprawled all over the floor among an ocean of LEGO bricks. My brother and I resurrected neighborhoods, cars, and tiny monuments. We had lengthy discussions about the kinds of bricks we would use, the size and color, and where we would place each structure.
In the end, we spent hundreds of hours like this over the years- playing and building, having fun. It was not in the hope of anything more than exploring what we could do in that moment, but recalling those precious childhood memories got me thinking a lot about modular design.
Modular design is not a concept limited to LEGO creations; in fact, you can find it all over nature. From the inner lives of termite mounds, anthills, and beehives to the structure of cells or genes, modular design (i.e. a way of building things using separate, interchangeable parts that can be combined, rearranged, or replaced without changing the whole system.) has been one of the most effective design ideas on earth for longer than humans have even been around to observe it.
Lately, in our noble pursuit of a circular economy, some fields have started to take note of the efficiency of modular design.
What I want to pose to you today is this: What if we leaned in to “playing with blocks” and applied it even more widely?
If you were once that kid who spent hours reconfiguring LEGO bricks into new creations, this one’s for you.
Top 3 Lessons Insights From Blocks In Nature
#1: Modularity Is Nature’s Favorite Design Language.
Modularity means building things in independent, reusable parts that can be rearranged without needing to redesign the whole system.
Nature does this brilliantly: cells, coral reefs, DNA, and mushroom networks all grow through repeating modular units.
This allows for growth, adaptation, and resilience—if one part fails, the whole doesn’t collapse.
To apply this in your own life, don’t try to redesign everything all at once.
Break your goals or routines into small, repeatable blocks—like a 20-minute creative block each morning, or modular habits that can be swapped in and out depending on your energy.
In your career, you can build a portfolio of modular skills.
Rather than following one rigid path, develop stackable capabilities—communication, data literacy, design, etc.—that you can rearrange for different roles or industries.
Finally, design products and systems that can grow, shrink, or shift easily.
Modular housing, open-source platforms, and refillable packaging all reduce waste and increase adaptability.
Build with the expectation that parts will change.
#2: A Circular Economy Is A Creative Challenge.
A circular economy aims to eliminate waste by designing products, systems, and lifestyles for reuse, repair, and regeneration. However, this isn’t about limiting ourselves—it’s about reimagining the lifecycle of everything we create.
Ultimately, creativity thrives not when we have infinite resources, but when we work within our constraints.
LEGO is a perfect example: the same bricks are reused across decades to build infinite new things. In the real world, companies can design products to be taken apart, repaired, and reassembled, rather than discarded.
In your life, you can think of creativity and circularity as having a mutually beneficial relationship with each other.
The more we incorporate circularity into our design processes, the more we build our own creativity. Similarly, the more creative we are, the easier we will find it to work within our constraints and design for circularity right from the get-go.
Ultimately, it’s most effective to view reuse not as an obligation, but as a game.
Try to find joy in creatively repurposing what you already have—clothes, food scraps, notebooks, tech.
Make circular living feel expressive, not restrictive.
In your career, explore how you can reuse knowledge, tools, or content in new ways.
Don’t reinvent the wheel every time—remix it.
Reuse old project formats, slide decks, blog structures, or workflows to spark innovation.
Try designing for disassembly and reconfiguration. Create systems with built-in second lives. Consider whether a product could become a raw material in the future.
#3: Make Failure A Design Feature.
Nature doesn’t fear failure—it learns from it.
Evolution is built on trial, error, mutation, and adaptation.
Modular systems fail in small, local ways- failing in the realm of one block without taking down the whole system.
That kind of safe-to-fail structure is essential for resilience and long-term success.
A forest doesn’t collapse if one tree falls. A LEGO structure doesn’t ruin the entire set when it breaks—it just invites a new build.
In tech, agile design is based on this: test small, learn fast, iterate.
In your personal life, try reframing mistakes as “prototypes” of who you’re becoming.
Instead of aiming for perfection, try short experiments—test new routines, hobbies, or habits without big commitments. Let mini-failures teach you instead of discouraging you.
At work, test pilots, seek feedback loops, and create room for iteration and improvement rather than locking into a rigid plan and risking a larger failure.
In the end it all boils down to designing with the expectation that there will be change, evolution, and failure.
By making this a design feature, we start building systems that can grow from failure rather than being hurt by it.
This kind of system will last and prosper.
Rebuilding Block By Block
When we think about lots of the big systems in the world today, unfortunately, there are very few that we can say are designed for true circularity.
However, that doesn’t mean we should despair.
Good design is about intentionality—and that means breaking a system down, block by block, and rebuilding it better.
Successful designs are also about iterating.
Perhaps that can give us hope, to know that we are only at the current iteration, with many more to come, and that all it takes for us to arrive at our goal state is for someone to keep taking the next step.
Maybe, even, the next iteration starts with you.
Thought To Action
- Practice modular thinking by breaking a project, routine, or goal into swappable parts that you can rearrange.
- Play with constraints—set a time, material, or space limit—and design something new within those boundaries.
- Use nature as a model: observe how systems in biology adapt through repetition, resilience, and regeneration.
- Revisit a childhood passion or game, and ask what it taught you about building, rebuilding, and imagination.
- Explore circular design through a creative challenge: reuse one item in five totally different ways.
Sources
No external sources were used.
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