An Inside Look at Lego’s New Tech-Packed Smart Brick

The project needed more than mere technical insight. It needed a president of play. A fun foreman.

Lego Group design director Michael Fuller has been at the company for 18 years. “The Lego Batman Movie, that was five, six years of my life,” Fuller says. After wrapping the 2017 film, Fuller was trying to work out what he was going to do next when Donaldson approached him.

“I actually tried to convince him I wasn’t right for it. I’m not techie at all. I’m old-school. But Tom said, ‘No, that’s what we need. I’ve got lots of smart engineers and techie people. I need a toy guy.’”

And so Fuller was drafted in. “In the early days, I was just drawing concepts. I had a wall at Cambridge Consultants with hand-drawn concepts of ‘What if? What if? What if?’”

From there, they moved on to handmade prototypes, a phase Fuller estimates encompassed half of the total development time. “It was quite a small team of people, and you had to be resilient,” he says. This resilience was put to the test when early prerelease Smart Brick Jungle Explorers play sets were scrapped in favor of the eventual Star Wars models.

“These were actually out in the world,” Fuller says, holding up one of the boxes marked with TEST written in large red letters. “Kids did play with them. We got feedback. I went through evenings of telemetry, trying to work out which bits kids were really enjoying and which bits they weren’t so interested in.”

Prerelease Smart Brick Jungle Explorers play sets were sent out into the world and were used to gather play data and tweak the interactive system.

Courtesy of Lego

In all my years of reporting on gear I’ve seen very few products survive the development process with no compromises. Something is nearly always sacrificed along the way for ease, or money, or both. Not so, it seems, with the Smart Brick.

“We said, ‘Let’s do everything. Let’s put it all in,’” Knights says. He lists all of the wish-list features that were eventually delivered. There’s a synthesizer in the system; the sounds you hear are generated, not prerecorded. There are sensors that can detect light and dark and color. There are lights on the brick that can not only change color but also communicate to other bricks like a TV remote. Some of this didn’t even exist at the start of the project.

Toward the end of my Smart Brick tour, it strikes me that there is clearly tech developed here that could have applications beyond Lego. Possibly even military uses, not that the company would ever blunder into such a sector. Still, there is the chance to make much more money than through just selling building block sets.

Donaldson is uninterested. He claims profit was never the driving factor. “I didn’t say, ‘Here’s a business case with the exact revenue.’ We just said, ‘If we can do this, we all know there would be something big.’”