28 January 2026

On 23 January, a LEGO® Serious Play workshop was once again held at the University of Applied Sciences (HSN) as part of the R&D Management module. The event was organised and moderated by students on the Industrial Engineering and Management (WIM) and Product Engineering and Production (PEP) Master's degree courses.

After an intensive skills-building phase, the participants - mainly students on the bachelor's degree programme in mechanical engineering - dedicated themselves to a practical task: a production process step from automotive manufacturing that they had chosen themselves was to be mapped using LEGO® models and further developed for the future in line with Industry 5.0. The focus was particularly on customer centricity, human-machine collaboration and an increase in efficiency and sustainability.

The LEGO® Serious Play method is a scientifically based moderation and creative method that is successfully used in companies for strategy development, team building and problem solving. By building metaphors with LEGO® bricks, complex relationships are visualised, 100% participation of all participants is made possible and unconscious knowledge is activated.

Under the guiding principle of „thinking with your hands“ (hand-brain principle), the participants developed creative, application-oriented concepts for optimising production processes. Modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, collaborative robots (cobots) and digital twins played a central role in the discussions surrounding the models built. These were seen as supporting tools to relieve employees, promote creative activities and enable personalised and more sustainable products.

The workshop impressively illustrated how the principles of Industry 5.0 - including human-machine interaction, customer integration, ergonomics, modularity, resilience and sustainable value creation - can already be taught and experienced in a practical way today. Topics such as supply chain design and the derivation of suitable key performance indicators (KPIs) for evaluating robust production systems were also included in the results.