The LEGO Group’s Playful 90th

August 10, 2022 0 By Brian Crecente

This month marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the company that, two years later, would become known as LEGO® and then eventually the LEGO Group.

During its nine decades, Ole Kirk Christiansen’s company would first specialize in wooden toys, then plastic playthings, and then, in 1949, the plastic interlocking blocks that would eventually become the worldwide LEGO brick phenomenon.

But the company’s massive success in the world of toys wasn’t assured.

“I can tell you that, throughout the time, there have been some that didn’t necessarily think that we would reach 90 years,” Thomas Kirk Kristiansen, great grandson of Ole Kirk Christiansen, told a gathering of employees at a recent celebration of the anniversary in Billund, Denmark. “But here we are stronger, bigger, better, reaching many more children, and more playful than ever.

“That doesn’t just happen by chance. It happens because of all of you amazing employees. It’s because of you, who every day relentlessly push with dedication, passion, and super hard work for creating even better, more creative play experiences to reach children all over the world.”

That speech, given to about 5,000 LEGO Group employees earlier this year, wasn’t just about recognizing the company’s anniversary. It also kicked off another sort of celebration – something perhaps unusual for a multi-billion-dollar company.

Every year, the LEGO Group hosts Play Days, a gathering created for company employees to play together, hang out, and have fun. This year’s event included games of cornhole, a chance to check out LEGO video games and to play with bricks, with sand, with toys. It even included a massive concert. And that was just in Billund. Similar celebrations were happening at LEGO Group campuses around the world.

It’s an event that, in many ways, is an inversion of LEGO DNA, a chance for the world’s most known toy makers to reconnect with their inner child, to seek inspiration from their own history, to reflect on the powerful values of imagination, fun, creativity, caring, learning, and quality that have served the LEGO Group so well. To remember the promise of building joy as true partners with each other and co-creating fans, and to experience the product of a company built on the spirit of “only the best being good enough.”

In the lead up to the celebration, Bits N’ Bricks spoke with a number of LEGO Group teams about how their work at the company fits into creating playful experiences.

Sean McEvoy, vice president of LEGO Games, noted that the Games team is working toward a goal of helping to make digital play a cornerstone of the LEGO Group brand by 2032.

“LEGO games is one expression of digital play at the LEGO Group, and I think the expression of digital play at the LEGO Group can be even bigger and broader than games specifically,” he said. “Digital play experiences don’t always have to be a game. Specifically, they can be bigger and broader.”

Those bigger broader experiences could include something like the company’s work with Nintendo to create LEGO Super Mario™ or the recently announced partnership with Epic Games.

“There will be play experiences that will emerge from that partnership that we’re incredibly excited about,” he said. “But we’re also equally excited about the opportunity to create kind of safe spaces for kids and families in the metaverse to come, the metaverse as it exists, and really to invent a new space on digital platforms that didn’t exist previously. The last version of the internet was not necessarily built with kids and families in mind. Can we try for something different this time?”

McEvoy believes that the work the LEGO Group and Epic Games are doing on the metaverse will eventually touch all aspects of the company.

He also noted that the LEGO Group’s past projects are factoring into their decision-making for future ones. That’s an important element of the company’s approach to design and planning. It’s also a key reason why the LEGO Group has its own internal museum of sorts: the LEGO Idea House.

The Idea House sits in the original family home of Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of LEGO. The building attached to the home was his woodworking shop and later the first LEGO factory. But the LEGO Group didn’t just preserve this house. They’ve turned it into a private museum used to introduce new employees and partners to both the history of the company and its important philosophy of play.

“When you work with the LEGO Group, either as an employee or as a business partner, I think it’s essential that you understand what kind of company we are,” said LEGO corporate historian Signe Wiese. “And understanding what kind of company we are and why we behave the way we do. A good place to start, if you want to understand that part, is to know the company history, because a lot of the things that we still do and still say all the time – our core values – all of that is rooted in the fact that we are an old, family-owned company.”

Inside the Idea House is a full museum that corporate historians walk visitors through, explaining different elements of the company’s history and creations. It ends with a visit to an area known as Memory Lane, which houses a cross-section of the company’s products going back decades, each still in their original boxes.

The nearby LEGO Innovation House has a history of its own, but this one is found in the memories of its many talented designers who work on creating future products for the LEGO Group.

Niels Milan Pedersen is the master builder behind the Pirate theme sets, Galidor, and many, many more creations. He is among the last of a certain breed of LEGO brick designer, one who uses clay to sculpt his creations before recreating them in brick form.

“I’m the last one,” he said. “I’m only sculpting with my hands. All the others are mostly using computer programs. Some of them might start with a hand sculpture and then scan it into a computer and finish it there, but I’ll be the last one doing everything by hand.

“I really have to have it in my hands to feel what I’m doing.”

As the 90th anniversary hits, Pedersen finds himself reflecting on what has become a surprising 40-year career as a toy-maker.

“The company has changed in many ways, because it’s now so, so big and really much more ambitious,” he said. “But it still has a lot of the old LEGO spirit as we call it.”

That LEGO spirit is perhaps best captured in a relatively new addition to the city of Billund and the LEGO Group. The LEGO House, which sits on the site of the former town hall, is a public experiential museum that explores not just the history of the LEGO Group, but its deep connection with fans, and its own guiding principles and DNA.

Inside, the stairs leading between the floors of the exhibit wrap around a massive LEGO brick tree.

“We knew within the house there were certain locations where we wanted some kind of iconic big model, and of course the one in the center of the main staircase was an obvious place where we wanted a big model,” said LEGO House master builder Stuart Harris. “We tried lots of different ideas about what it would be in that space. But we kept coming back to the idea of doing a tree because it was so meaningful for the LEGO Group. It also was a great storytelling device.”

The levels of the LEGO House are each dedicated to different themes. The top floor is known as the masterpiece gallery and is the main showcase for the LEGO fan community. From there you dive back down into the building’s hands-on experiences, which are divided into four colored zones: green, red, yellow, and blue.

“Each colored zone is linked to a childhood development competence,” Harris said. “We’re very focused, of course, on learning through play. So that has been our thinking when we develop experience in the House, that we anchor it into a learning through play perspective.”

The green zone, for instance, is about social development. The blue zone is about cognitive or problem solving. The red zone is creativity and, finally, the yellow zone is emotional development.

“There’s a fifth competence, which is physical development, and that’s why we have the playgrounds outside,” Harris said. “So the experiences within those colored zones is tailored towards learning competence. And then in the basement, we have a history collection. This is a very popular visit for some of the fans to actually sort of relive their childhood and see those sets that maybe you got for Christmas – or maybe you never got for Christmas.

“I always think that it should be sponsored by Kleenex or somebody like that, because it can be a very emotional moment going down into the basement and seeing the archive and seeing the timeline of the LEGO Group.”

The LEGO Group’s multifaceted efforts touch on exploring the past to prepare for the future, and perhaps some of the company’s most interesting work is done in the LEGO Innovation House by people like Jonathan Trier Brinker, an interaction design manager, and Benjamin Lundquist Ma, a digital play design manager. Both focus on experimenting with and designing new types of play experiences. Where Ma says he works on finding the fun in those new types of play, Brinker likens himself to an animator at Pixar, working to make new LEGO experiences come alive with light and sound.

Perhaps most recently, you’ve seen their work in the LEGO Super Mario™ theme sets. Brinker, in fact, was responsible for creating Mario as a LEGO brick character.

“So, you have a character that has to be brought to life and somehow you have to figure out what are the tiny things that make people believe that he’s a small character,” Jonathan Trier Brinker said. “So, to give a really concrete example could be when you put Mario down and you put him on his back, he falls asleep. And then you think about, like, what is the sound of the little guy falling asleep? At what point does he fall asleep? What is the sound effect of that? What is the animation? All those little things that sell kids on the notion that this guy is now sleeping on your table. Everything that goes into that. That’s animation, it’s sound design, it’s having the right little technical gestures, it’s putting all those things together so that, when kids do it, it’s just natural. They don’t think about it.”

Ma added that Mario falling asleep is just the tip of the iceberg.

“My job is sort of trying out that entire iceberg of possibilities, and when we then do come up with the things that test really well, actually making them good,” he said. “Technology, of course, changes over time, so our toolbox of enabling these kinds of play experiences for kids gets easier over time. Technology is more easily embedded in toys. And as Jonathan said, you know, play is play. It’s not that we’re aiming to put technologies in, but when a certain play experience needs it, we have the ability to, and that’s just really cool.”

It’s this willingness to embrace technology, while not letting go of or forgetting the past, that enables the LEGO Group to be so nimble in its approach to creating joy through playful experiences.

That the people who dedicate their lives to sparking joy and fueling fun would take a day off once a year to play together shouldn’t be surprising, but it is, and it’s delightful, too.

Going to Billund to witness this Play Day, walking through the halls where people design sets, seeing the places they inhabit and the world they live in, brings important context to what so many people have described as LEGO DNA.

This article originally ran on LEGO.com as a summary of episode one of the weekly Bits N’ Bricks podcast, which you can listen to here.