So, why LEGO?

Well, it was what I had to hand. If I were a competent woodworker, perhaps I could have made something else. But I had Lego. In addition, LEGO is a superb tool for engineering and construction. LEGO bricks are made with great precision. You can stick hundreds of them together and still create something blessed with straight lines and ends that match up exactly.

Unlike other materials, LEGO needs nothing but itself to fix itself together, and it does that really well. At the same time, it's easy to dismantle and experiment with (try that with wood, or metal). Also LEGO doesn't need finishing. It's already smooth, shiny and a bright uniform colour.

Of course, LEGO also presents a number of limitations. It's directional - every piece has a top and a bottom. It's chunky, not fine, and you're stuck with its basic dimensions. You can't have half a piece of LEGO, unless you want ruined LEGO.

In this it reflects something of the nature of digital computers. They're both modular and binary. You can't have half bits, and everything has to be made out of these numerous discrete bits, each one of which is exactly the same as thousands of others. LEGO gives you straight lines and right angles, but curves, like the curves that you might see on a computer screen, are really composed of small squares. LEGO reminds you that we're all made of atoms. LEGO and digital computing are excellent metaphors for each other.

In Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs one of the characters laments that his childhood spent playing with LEGO (and his adult life spent writing computer software) has left him unable to appreciate properly the nature of organic things: he feels constantly compelled to reduce all to the limits of the schemas given by digital, modular, binary worlds. He feels unable to represent nature to himself, to think about it, except as reduced to large, bumpy atoms. But one need not fall into his predicament: this reduction is available to us, and as long as we're aware that it is a reduction, it's a useful and illuminating way of looking at things. So let's keep playing with LEGO and computers.