A LEGO Brickumentary Page #5

that people wanted to the stores.

Their fans knew what was wrong,

but LEGO company executives

weren't paying attention

to the community that had grown

around their product.

The seed of change had been

planted a few years earlier

with the release

of a product called Mindstorms.

This little yellow brick,

developed by LEGO and MIT,

turns LEGO creations

into interactive robots.

For us this was a great opportunity,

'cause we saw a great potential

of combining LEGO and computers.

LEGO had in mind that

they would develop it,

and then kids would play with it

in the prescribed way,

and they had as an audience children,

their standard, traditional audience.

But it really sort of captured

the imagination of people of all ages,

not just the young people that

Mindstorms was initially intended for.

In fact, in the first year

that Mindstorms came out,

half of the sales

were to adults for adult use.

Then there was someone who liked LEGO

who was at Stanford and was like,

"Hmm, this brick, I could hack

that open and reverse engineer it."

And they were opening up the Mindstorms.

They were writing new software for it.

Within three months,

a thousand hackers were working on it.

And this was rather a shock for them.

LEGO's response was

pretty much like, "What is this?"

They're taking apart what we created.

I mean, we put this together,

so it shouldn't be taken apart.

That's our secrets.

There was a lot of questions

in our leadership.

We could either take the aggressive

and protective and controlling route,

and the other route

would be to say well,

this is, uh, interesting.

In most companies,

and also in a very traditional way

of innovating

was to have it super-secret.

It's like closed walls, sign on the "X,"

and we couldn't say anything.

We had a lot of internal discussions

with our lawyers,

top management was involved.

Kjeld had to stand up and say,

"But I want this.

We're a company who makes things

that people can create with."

When a company starts

to deal with users,

and discovers that it

can get ideas from users,

that's Mindstorms.

That's the new way of saying,

you will deal with

your Adult Fans Of LEGO,

and you will get from them useful ideas.

We need to be aware

that 99.99%

of the smartest people in the world

don't work for us.

In the wake of the Mindstorms

product release,

the LEGO company was more open to ideas

that came from outside

the walls of its design room.

Chicago Architect Adam Reed Tucker

builds skyscrapers out of LEGO bricks.

In 2005, when his firm

went belly-up from the economy

Adam decided to return

to the more artistic side

of architecture by creating

architectural models.

One day I ventured out

to a local toy store

and filled about a dozen

shopping carts of LEGO sets

to get reacquainted with the brick.

And when I got home,

I dumped out all these sets,

and my fiance came home,

and she saw me sitting there

and she made a U-turn.

Then an hour later, called me and said,

"Is there something I need to know?"

Adam's work soon caught the attention

of the LEGO company's Paal Smith-Meyer.

And I had this idea that let's start

new business with people

who have a passionate

feeling about what we do.

And then I meet Adam

and he's standing there

with these super tall structures

built out of LEGO.

And I'm like, "Wow! These are amazing."

We can do a whole line

but me coming from the inside,

I need evidence, you know, I need proof.

So we can prove

to the world that this works.

Two months later, I come

to BrickWorld and Adam says,

"I have a surprise for you."

And then he's created

200 boxes of the first set.

On his own,

Adam had designed the box graphics

and had packaged every single set.

If Adam and Paal could make

the architecture series happen,

it would take some convincing.

After all, what Adam

was proposing to a toy company

wasn't exactly a toy

and up until now LEGO designs

were only made by LEGO designers.

If he hadn't taken and been so pushy,

LEGO architecture as it is today

probably wouldn't happen.

The series was a success,

and the line has been

expanding ever since.

So, it proved that we can work

with individuals on the outside.

It's not going to break LEGO.

It's actually creating energy.

It's creating kind of this hope,

uh, that we can make more things.

Adam is now working on a new venture

to push the LEGO boundaries.

Following up on what I did

with the LEGO architecture,

I wanted to create

a roller coaster for LEGO.

I'm always about pushing the lines.

To make the roller coaster work,

Adam designed

two new elements in his workshop:

a ball joint attached to a rail tie,

and a hitch to mount the ball in.

The fact that they do

create new elements,

um, gives me hope that, you know,

these elements can also be created.

Ten days later, Adam unveils

his coaster prototype

for Paal at BrickWorld.

It's so smooth. It's amazing. Whee!

So, that's more of like

um, a sci-fi kind of use.

This one is a runaway coal mine.

- Yeah.

- Or silver mine. Yeah.

This would not have

been possible before.

It might look like

a roller coaster part,

but hey, you can use it

for anything you want.

I think it's amazing.

I mean, I definitely

think that, you know,

kids, adults all over the world

will want to play with this.

- Everyone.

- Thanks, buddy.

In Tokyo, Japan, Kohei Nishlyama

has helped open the doors

to creativity from the LEGO community.

He's an expert in crowd creation

and calls his project Cuusoo,

which means "dream" or "wish."

Kohei worked with Paal

to create a platform

that brings LEGO users'

dreams to reality.

The idea for LEGO Cuusoo

is that anyone in the world

who has a LEGO idea can "wish"

that LEGO will one day make this.

The only thing you have

to do is actually share it

with the world on the Cuusoo platform,

and through that, create a community

of interest around your wish.

Designs that gain support

from 10,000 or more LEGO users

go up for review with LEGO management.

It's quite an honor for a design

to get released as an official LEGO set.

The first idea that got

10,000 votes was LEGO Minecraft.

Took 48 hours.

It broke our servers several times.

I think it's safe to say that LEGO fans

were waiting for an idea

like Kohei's to come along.

Now the finalists are being reviewed

for Cuusoo set number five.

If this is what it is to be a geek,

I am definitely okay with that

'cause, uh, it's the most fun

I've ever had.

"Cuusoo" loosely translated

means a wish.

And uh, my wish is to see

more space exploration.

I want people to be more

interested in space exploration.

I knew even from elementary school

that I wanted to be

a mechanical engineer when I grew up.

The trouble is, there were no

mechanical engineering classes

in middle school.

So uh, I would design

entire manned missions

to Jupiter using LEGO designs.

After college, Stephen landed

his first engineering job,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes