LEGO (25 page)

Stark Danish modernity gives way to the brightness of LEGO when we step inside the doors of the Idea House and experience a color explosion. The walls are covered in primary-color panels, lit from behind and detailing the recent history of the LEGO Group. One of the first panels I see explains about adult fans becoming involved with the company through Mindstorms.

“Working with adult fans is very rewarding because of their passion. They love this company,” says Jette, who often interacts with adult fans working on exhibitions. As a way to thank them, LEGO often allows AFOLs who are partnering with the company inside the Idea House, which is typically closed to the public.

“So many times this feels like home to them. But we have to work together in the right way; this is a business and they are fans. I just have to make sure fans understand they’re still a guest in order to keep that integrity between us,” says Jette.

Her sentiment is clear. I am a guest in LEGO’s house. She is not admonishing me, only setting up the rules of the tour. In that moment, she makes me think of Jane Goodall explaining how she remains objective: Jette walks among the fans, but she is not one of them.

I like Jette because I get the feeling she has taken the time to understand the AFOL community and found a way to work them into the living history of the exhibit. The Idea House is where LEGO employees learn about the creation of play themes and how the company has evolved.

“It was important to the family that everybody in the company understands why we’re here and what we’re about. While we’re looking to the future, why don’t we see what we can learn from the past?” says Jette.

Ole Kirk built this brick house with its pair of concrete lions sitting outside the entrance in 1924. His home became the Idea House in 1990 with a multiroom display that covered LEGO’s history. The further I get from the entrance, the more I start to feel that I’m literally a guest in Ole Kirk’s house. Between two sets of doors, a fish tank gurgles unexpectedly. His grandson was responsible for feeding the fish. He also happened to be the third generation to take over the company.

“Kjeld is like his grandfather. His connection with the company is emotional; he never wanted to be called CEO,” says Jette, as we pass by the fish tank and back toward the early days of LEGO.

Jette shows me a stairway that leads to the administrative offices on the second floor. “I’ll be up there ifyou need me,” she says, leaving me to explore on my own.

Inside this house, Ole Kirk Christiansen becomes a real person. There’s the desk where he sat and probably reviewed the models designed by his seventeen-year-old son, Godtfred, in 1937. Ole Kirk was a serial entrepreneur and a regular churchgoer with a weird sense of humor. One of his favorite jokes was to dump a bucket of water on an unsuspecting victim. He doesn’t seem that different from my dad, who tells nonsensical wordplay jokes and who was overjoyed that my brother was willing to be a part of the family copier sales business.

I will spend six hours inside the Idea House—alone for at least half that time—before I leave for the day. Every surface of the museum is covered with exhibits in the primary colors of LEGO and back-lit panels that explain the company’s past, present, and future. At any given moment, I’m filming, snapping photos, or just standing in a slack-jawed way that suggests I’m not all there. LEGO is like no other company I’ve ever approached to interview. I’ve never been allowed on my own inside a corporate building, and I’ve rarely been left to draw my own conclusions without a public relations representative by my side to supply the company’s point of view. At LEGO, my public relations representative, Jan, brings a laptop to do work during interviews, never interjects an answer when I’m questioning an employee, and makes it a point to take me to lunch every day. The only thing I can figure is that it’s fundamentally a nice company.

I’ve been alone inside the Idea House for close to three hours when I hear footsteps softly approaching on the wooden floors.

“I didn’t know if you were still here,” says Jette.

“I’m thinking about sleeping over.” She laughs and motions for me to follow her.

Jette pushes on one of the brightly colored wall panels in the middle of the exhibit, and a narrow staircase is revealed. Heading down the stairs, I notice that the white ceiling tiles are the same as in any finished basement in the suburbs. There’s nothing to suggest we’re walking toward a priceless collection of LEGO bricks.

Below the Idea House is the temperature-controlled, sparkling white room known as the vault, or archives. Inside an unmarked door, a series of rolling white metal bookcases lie on a track, the sets spanning from left to right ascending by decade. This is a near complete collection of all of the sets ever released—even LEGO hasyet to determine exactly what sets still need to be found.

“We just need to keep these for legal purposes, maintaining the sets on file in case we have to refer to them,” says Jette.

LEGO sees this room as patent or copyright protection; I see it as a path back to my childhood. She winds a black handle, and the entire row of white bookcases slides easily to the right. We walk down the narrow opening to the early sets. Each step literally takes us back in time. Jette holds up some of the early bricks, sold by the piece in barbershops. The earlier sets have a slightly rounder logo, and give off the earthy smell of my grandparents’ house in Connecticut.

I ask how the sets have been accumulated over time. “It’s not like we go out on eBay and bid on these things.” Jette says. “We find sets in Denmark sometimes, and some have even been returned over the years.”

I keep reminding myself that LEGO isn’t a collector. There isn’t an emotional attachment to the product; the amassing of sets has been closer to completing an administrative checklist than following an obsessive quest. While the Idea House chronicles the history of the company, it does so in the context of the Kristiansen family. The bricks are the result of a set of values; they are not necessarily valued sets.

“That was a train that started and stopped via a whistle,” says Jette, pointing to a 1968 set. It’s two simple railcars, a 4.5-volt electronic train that responds to sound, and box art that portrays a cartoon conductor with a musical note emanating from a black whistle. Jette doesn’t have time to be nostalgic; she continues to pull boxes and sets, giving me a running commentary on the vault. Before I realize what’s happening, she is lifting the cover of Set 375, showing me the pieces of the Yellow Castle inside the original blister packaging. I hold the box gingerly because I know what it means to collectors like Dan Brown.

“Could we see the sets from the early 1980s?” I ask, my voice cracking slightly.

“Sure,” says Jette, twisting the handle. I walk halfway down the aisle and see a familiar box. I grab it without asking for permission. Set 1082, a jumbled collection of red and blue roof tiles that came out in 1982, is the first set I can remember getting as a child. The pieces were mostly slopes and inverted slopes. I think that’s why it stuck out—there’s not a single rectangle in the box.

“Do you want a picture?” asks Jette. I don’t want a picture; I want to tear open the plastic shrink-wrapping. Whether it is an endorphin rush or just the power of a happy memory, I’m elated at finding this set haphazardly stacked among puzzles and DUPLO boxes. This is my LEGO. This is what I wanted when I started building again—the chance to think that I could build anything and the need to use my imagination to turn a bunch of random bricks into something recognizable and complete.

“It’s always surprising to me to see how people will react, because they feel so strongly attached to the sets. I never know if someone is going to cry or laugh,” says Jette. I smile in response, because I kind of feel like doing both.

 

 

The past few days in Denmark have been marked by several moments like this one, when I found myself getting lost in what I was experiencing. And most of them have been unexpected. When Kate and I entered the Mindstorms Discovery Center at LEGOLAND two days before, I didn’t think we would end up staying for the better part of two hours. I’ve been intimidated by Mindstorms since I attended Brickworld, considering that my only computer skill is the ability to type seventy-plus words a minute.

But in a strange way, it is as if we have practiced on the couch in Kansas City in order to get ready to build in public. We now build together seamlessly, with me pulling the pieces according to the instructions and Kate snapping them together. When a motorized car finally runs after we switch outlets, we laugh like we did when we first started dating.

In connecting with each other over Mindstorms, I saw what it would be like to play with LEGO with my children, and I want that badly. I want Kate and me to be sitting at a table, helping our kid to work through his frustrations and feel the joy of making a tiny carousel spin. I get it now. We are missing something from our life without a baby.

I’m not the first adult to be profoundly transformed by messing around with Mindstorms. In fact, the robotic line has changed LEGO’s relationship with adult fans more than any single product in the company’s history. The typical product cycle for a LEGO line is two years. The first iteration of Mindstorms, the Robotics Invention System kit, launched in 1998 and is still selling strongly today. It wasn’t until 2004 that LEGO began to seriously develop the second version of the robotics kit.

“We found after a couple of years that 50 percent of our users were adults. We had dubbed this group the shadow market,” says Steven Canvin, the marketing manager who oversees Mindstorms. Steven has the hair and posture of Chuck Woolery from the
Love Connection
game show, but Steven’s glasses and deliberate manner of speech show that he has a lot more depth.

“If we ask children what they want, they would be very pleased to say whatever you want, or they might not have the expression level to give us new input. But instead we have an active recognized target group in adults. They have so much passion that we can ask users to get more involved because they’re also pushing for it,” says Steven.

LEGO initially identified four adult fans to work with Mindstorms: electronics engineer John Barnes from New York, software engineer Steve Hassenplug from Indiana, engineer Ralph Hempel from Ontario, Canada, and homeschool teacher David Schiling from Washington. They were brought together
Oceans 11
-style, with the company relying on their expertise in construction, hardware, software, and firmware (the operating system for Mindstorms suppliers). The four men were invited to participate in a closed Web forum if they were willing to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Less than an hour later, all four were on board.

“The LEGO Group is known to be a close-knit company that holds its secrets close to its chest. To be trusted with this much product knowledge for as long as we have makes us feel good,” wrote Hempel in a testimonial on LEGO’s Web site.

This was the Mindstorms User Panel (MUP)—four AFOLs who were invited into the research and development department, agreeing to pay their own airfare to Billund so they would have the chance to influence the second generation of Mindstorms products. It was in those discussions that the Hassenpin was introduced, after Steve Hassenplug talked about the need for a Technic pin that could connect two Technic beams at a right angle. The guy whom I met at Brickworld as he worked a pneumatic centipede has a LEGO piece unofficially named after him.

In November 2005, the MUP was expanded to fourteen people. The following January, a test group of one hundred people received prototypes of Mindstorms NXT as part of the Mindstorms Developer Program. Those one hundred were selected from among ten thousand who applied. The new sets were met with a bit of criticism early, having moved completely to studless building. But the Hassenpin enabled people to build lighter, stronger connections and mimic many of the angles afforded by studded bricks. And LEGO suddenly had an active group of program testers, finding and in some cases even solving bugs with the software.

Mindstorms NXT was released in July 2006, but the original MUP group is still involved.

“They are part-time vigilantes and part-time contributors to innovation cycles,” says Steven Canvin. “They find things online that we would never see and point us in the right direction.”

But as Jette mentioned in the Idea House, the relationship between AFOLs and LEGO is not usually based on a contract. And in that flexibility lies a gray area, which means that LEGO can benefit from the passion of LEGO fans, but has to trust them to act in a continually altruistic manner.

“I imagine that fans are constantly pushing or pulling, trying to get you to stretch,” I say, fishing to see if there is any tension underlying that relationship.

“That challenge is to make sure we are both aligned in terms of our expectations. In some cases, confidentiality gets blurred because they’re seeing our product development a year out, and that means the whole system is based on a lot of trust,” replies Steven.

We’re talking in the all-white conference room attached to the Idea House.

“It’s better to have them on your side than against you. Because their knowledge turned to the Dark Side could be quite devastating,” I suggest. I don’t know if it’s nerves, but I suddenly can’t stop using Star Wars references.
Maybe I am a huge Star Wars nerd.
I jot down in my notebook to lay off the metaphors from the pantheon of George Lucas.

“I trust them because this is their passion,” says Steven. But he’s also careful. The initial group working with Mindstorms was handpicked and limited to four people. By the time the MUP was in place with one hundred beta testers, the NXT sets were scheduled for release in six months—not really enough time for a competitor to rip off LEGO if there was a leak.

The slight risk is ultimately worth the reward. The adult fans who have expertise in Mindstorms are like FBI agents who speak Arabic: they’re a rare commodity. Mindstorms is a departure from the low-tech plastic bricks that LEGO has been known for over the first forty years of its existence. Even inside the company, the people assigned to market or sell Mindstorms might not have as much understanding as AFOLs of the robotic kits with a $249.99 price tag.