Rehearsing generative education with LEGO: speculative visual literacy for a metabolist imagination of college futures

This essay presents Metabolism, a LEGO-based building block game that uses visual thinking and communication to make the imagination of generative higher education futures tangible. Drawing on Japanese Metabolist architecture’s philosophy of impermanence and regeneration, the game treats curriculum as a living organism rather than static infrastructure. Through three rounds of collaborative building—autoethnographic, disciplinary, and regenerative—participants materially rehearse modular curriculum transformation before it exists institutionally. We theorise this practice of visual literacy as a rehearsal of possibilities, operating in the future tense, where participants construct, test, and regenerate structures that represent what education could be rather than what it currently is. The game demonstrates that visual literacy is constitutive of curricular thinking, in developing four competencies essential for what we call generative education: spatial representation of relational systems, reading built structures as epistemological arguments, iterative visual prototyping, and speculative narration with institutional ruins. This contribution extends visual literacy scholarship into institutional design and future-facing pedagogy.