An Inside Look at Lego’s New Tech-Packed Smart Brick
The project required more than just technical knowledge. He needed a gaming president. A fun foreman.
Michael Fuller, Lego Group’s design director, has been with the company for 18 years. “THE Lego Batman Movieit was five, six years of my life,” Fuller says. After finishing the 2017 film, Fuller was trying to figure out what he was going to do next when Donaldson approached him.
“I actually tried to convince him that I wasn’t cut out for this. I’m not a technician at all. I’m old school. But Tom said, ‘No, this is what we need.’ I have a lot of smart engineers and technicians. I need a toy guy.”
This is how Fuller was recruited. “At first I was just drawing concepts. I had a wall at Cambridge Consultants with hand-drawn concepts like ‘What if?’ What if? What if?”
From there, they moved on to hand-made prototypes, a phase that Fuller estimates accounts for half of the total development time. “It was a small team and you had to be resilient,” he says. This resilience was tested when the first Smart Brick Jungle Explorers playsets were abandoned in favor of the eventual Star Wars models.
“These were actually in the world,” Fuller says, holding up one of the boxes marked with TEST written in big red letters. “The kids were playing with them. We got feedback. I spent evenings telemetry, trying to figure out which elements the kids really liked and which ones they weren’t really interested in.”
In all my years of reporting on gear, I’ve seen very few products survive the development process without compromise. Something is almost always sacrificed along the way for the sake of convenience, or money, or both. This is not the case, it seems, with the Smart Brick.
“We said, ‘Let’s do everything. “Let’s put it all in there,” Knights says. He lists all the wish list features that were finally delivered. There’s a synthesizer in the system; the sounds you hear are generated, not pre-recorded. There are sensors that can detect light, dark and color. There are lights on the brick that can not only change color but also communicate with other bricks like a TV remote. at the start of the project.
Towards the end of my tour of Smart Brick, it seems to me that there is clearly technology being developed here that could have applications beyond Lego. Perhaps even for military purposes, although the company would never enter such a sector. Still, it’s possible to make a lot more money than just selling sets of building blocks.
Donaldson is not interested. He says profit was never the determining factor. “I didn’t say, ‘Here’s a business case with the exact revenues.’ We just said, “If we can do this, we all know there’s going to be something big.” »
