My 5-year-old son is developing a collection of Lego bricks, much as I did when I was his age. When my collection got big enough, my mother gave me a set of large plastic bins and we sorted them mostly by color. I think this categorization came naturally to her as a visual artist.
However, our sorting system had some problems:
The smallest pieces sink to the bottom and the largest pieces float on top, making it difficult to find small pieces.
When you are looking for a very particular shape but don’t care what color it is, it requires you to have a good memory of your inventory; essentially a database index to speed up the search by guessing a color-bin that probably has that type of piece.
We lacked technical vocabulary for the thousands of types of pieces and how to distinguish them.
Recalling the vast amounts of time I spent sifting through pieces in my childhood (a sound that still echoes), I vowed to come up with a system of organization for my son that facilitates faster search. My love of systemizing is also just as good a reason to undertake this.
If you were to segregate the pieces as strictly as possible, you would not have enough compartments for everything. The distribution of parts has a long tail; that is to say, there are a large number of few-of-a-kind parts. There is also a very large number of certain kinds of bricks, such as 2×4. Thus, there is the problem of acquiring a set of bins that somewhat fits the shape of your distribution.
Economy motivates us to minmize the number and size of bins by grouping parts together according to some traits, such as
Efficiency moves us to maximize the number of bins, reducing pressure to use these traits.
There is an interesting interplay between the growing collection and the adapting and expanding organization system. When the collection grows, it reduces free space in the bins and challenges existing categories, sometimes prompting a reorganization. Most of the turbulence is in the tail, but typically when new pieces are acquired they follow a distribution similar to the collection. This means that pressure is typically applied across all the categories. Parts of significant number will begin to get crowded.
Ergonomics of access also matters but is not a property of a piece so much as a property of a piece in a bin. As a bin fills up, it is harder to get to the bottom of it. Shallower bins hold fewer parts but are easier to access.
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© 2025 Karl Schultheisz