LEGO says it tests ‘everything’ with kids – and it can lead to unexpected results
From City Space sets to the UCS Millennium Falcon, the LEGO Group says it tests ‘everything’ with kids – and the design team has revealed how that can sometimes lead to unexpected results.
Whether it’s a 6+ model designed first and foremost for children or a 7,500-piece LEGO Star Wars set destined to be housed within coffee tables around the world, pretty much everything that rolls off the production line at Billund has at some stage been in the hands of kids during the design process. 75382 TIE Interceptor might have an 18+ label on the box, but that doesn’t mean it will be built exclusively by adults.
The alternative scenario is one that the LEGO Group still chooses to account for in its products, says LEGO Star Wars Senior Model Designer César Soares. “Sometimes we test sets that are not even for kids,” he tells Brick Fanatics. “We can test UCS sets with kids. What do they think about it? Do they like it? Would they play with it? Sometimes they pick it up in a way that [makes us say], ‘Oh, I never thought that person would pick it up like that.’
“And it breaks. So that’s something to take into consideration. We test everything with kids. Everything. Even the big Millennium Falcon was tested with kids.”
Understanding how different demographics approach its most complicated sets is only one piece of the puzzle, though. The LEGO Group might have been doing this for more than 90 years, but kids can still surprise designers during tests – and send them back to the drawing board. For example, while some playsets include specific spots to place minifigures, such as 75385 Ahsoka Tano’s Duel on Peridea, vehicles like the X-wing or TIE Fighter tend not to include side models for their surplus characters.
César says that kids ‘don’t really mind’ not having a specific place for their minifigures in those sets – sometimes they’ll just pop them on the floor and fire the spring-loaded shooters at them – but it can throw up unexpected scenarios too.
“With vehicles, sometimes they put [the minifigures] on the wings, sometimes they put them in crazy places,” César adds. “And that’s actually one of the points that we [consider] in our set reviews and development: can the kids put the minifigure anywhere? If they try to put it on the wing, does the wing break? We have to take all that into consideration, because kids just place minifigures everywhere. They’re very imaginative, as you know.
“We take a lot of feedback from kids’ tests. It’s actually amazing and very, very interesting how much we rely on those tests.”
That reliance is not only in a structural sense – making sure these models can withstand any kind of play scenario that kids might dream up – but from a narrative perspective, too. Senior Design Manager Daniel Meehan is heading up this year’s LEGO City Space range, and has revealed how one test led to a dramatic shift in story across the entire subtheme of spacecraft, rockets and labs.
Speaking to Fortune, he explained how a child picked up a wheeled vehicle and began flying it around, collecting aliens along the way. “We’re very practical, we’re adults… but in the eyes of kids, it was a perfect space flying vehicle,” Daniel said. “But there was one complaint: [the kid] said we need more aliens. And we actually did put more aliens in the box as a result of that one kid.”
Those small green aliens pop up across a couple of themes this year, including City and Friends, tying them together in both narrative and design (in addition to the ‘space’ branding across their boxes). It’s part of a wider push into space as a passion point for 2024 – but it could have looked pretty different if not for that one test. Food for thought.
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- I like to think of myself as a journalist first, LEGO fan second, but we all know that’s not really the case. Journalism does run through my veins, though, like some kind of weird literary blood – the sort that will no doubt one day lead to a stress-induced heart malfunction. It’s like smoking, only worse. Thankfully, I get to write about LEGO until then.
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