Subject:
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Playtime the future of LEGO®
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Sun, 1 Feb 2004 05:56:15 GMT
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Playtime in the land of LEGO®
From: spectrum online.
Jan. 31, 2004
“UP THERE is where I have my table, but, unfortunately, you can’t see
it,” says Lau Kofoed Kierstein, smiling sheepishly and pointing at some
second-story windows in a brick building with a red-tile roof. We’re standing
in a charming, green, leaf-strewn quadrangle in the bucolic headquarters complex
of the toy giant LEGO® System A/S in Billund, Denmark.
For a year now Kierstein has been the technical lead “on a project
of great strategic importance....It’s going to be a big blast
when it comes out, that’s for sure. It will be a new era for
Lego.”
“We play a lot, and we test a lot of different things,” he adds. “Every
week, we have kids coming in, and we play with them to see what is cool for
them, what is hip for them. It’s intense because we are on unknown ground.”
That’s all he can say about it.
Really? Nothing else? “Well, it comes out in 2005.”
The worldof high-tech toy making is viciously competitive, with huge
fortunes turning on the ideas and expertise of a relatively
small number of people. But if the 30-year-old Kierstein is
typical, these people are not letting a little cutthroat competition
stand in the way of rather great amounts of fun. On our second
day of meetings, he apologizes for being a few minutes late. It turns out he
and his co-workers had spent the morning racing some radio-controlled cars.
The ubiquitous primary-colored plastic building blocks remain the backbone
of the LEGO line, but electronics-based playthings—such as the MindStorms line
of modular robotic toys—make up about 10 percent of the company’s 450 different
retail offerings, according to LEGO spokeswoman Mette Uhd Hansen. And
Kierstein, as senior technologist in LEGO Global Innovation and Marketing
Organization, finds himself involved with almost everything the company is
working on that beeps, glows, talks, walks, or races around the floor.
Besides designing toys and brainstorming about them, he helps designers
and marketers understand what can be done with electronics, he travels around
the world to keep in touch with LEGO freelance toy designers, and he checks in
periodically at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., which LEGO
cosponsors.
At LEGO home base in Billund, he has a work area in each of two LEGO
buildings; they’re bright, open, airy spaces where he and other LEGO designers
and engineers talk, hash out designs, play with toys, and kick around ideas. At
the moment, those areas are strewn with secret prototype toys, which is why I’m
not allowed to enter.
A lifelong music fan who plays bass guitar in a U2 cover band called
Elevation, Kierstein found his way into the toy business through
his specific passion: acoustics. Four years ago, while he was working in
Copenhagen as an engineer at an acoustics institute affiliated with the
Technical University of Denmark, he had an idea for an inexpensive circuit to
detect where sounds are coming from. He thought LEGO might want it. They
didn’t, but they did want him.
“I was lucky. Or they were lucky. I don’t know,” he laughs.
His first assignment at LEGO was to come up with an action figure to
go with a children’s sci-fi television show called “Galidor.” The company’s
franchise director, Jacob Kragh, turned Kierstein loose on the project with
these words: “We need a $50 item. Do something interesting.”
He did. He designed a doll that interacts with the “Galidor” TV show,
or with other dolls of its kind. Placed up to a few meters away from a TV, the
dolls occasionally blurt out comments, seemingly reacting with perfect timing to
the TV characters’ exclamations or other events on the screen. It’s all done
with a simple but powerful acoustic communications system
of Kierstein’s conception.
Basically, the show’s soundtrack sends out acoustic signals that trigger
any one of 227 prerecorded utterances in the doll, or 85 simple animations that
play on a small LCD screen on the toy figure’s back. Viewers of the show don’t
notice the signals, an extremely faint chirping, because Kierstein’s system
masks them in other noises in the show’s soundtrack and also exploits
psychoacoustic quirks in human hearing.
The ingeniousness of the system is in that masking, and also in the fact that
by relying on simple electronic components and very clever design, Kierstein’s
team held the cost of the entire acoustic receiving system in each doll below 7
Danish kroner, or about US $1.
For Kierstein, the project was a whirlwind introduction to the world of
big-time toy making. Several months into the project, he had to fly to
California for some meetings with the producers of “Galidor.”
“I had just started at LEGO, and suddenly I’m standing on Santa Monica Beach,
talking to Hollywood producers. Who could imagine that?”
The action figure, called the Galidor Kek Powerizer, was well received
by its target audience of six- to eight-year-old boys. But the TV show wasn’t a
big hit, and the doll is already hard to find in stores. Nevertheless, the
acoustic communications system will show up in future toys, Kierstein hints.
Best of all, though, as far as Kierstein is concerned, the toy made some
children happy. Of all the possible confirmations of a new toy’s worth, the best
one for him is “looking at children’s faces when they see something surprising
and they think it’s magic.”
—GLENN ZORPETTE
LAU KOFOED KIERSTEIN
AGE: 30
•WHAT HE DOES: Comes up with ideas for new toys; designs toys.
•FOR WHOM: LEGO System A/S
•WHERE HE DOES IT: Billund, Denmark
•FUN FACTORS: Tests prototype toys with children; travels around the world to
meet with toy designers and check out new electronic components; plays with
competitors’ toys.
-end of report-
The only thing I have to say is...only 11 months until 2005.
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