LEGO & Product Design: A new way of sketching

LEGO & Product Design: A new way of sketching

Verhaar, M.

Tempelman, E. (mentor)
Van Breemen, E. (mentor)
Brøndum, M. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

Product Engineering

2010-10-06

The following document reports a graduation project done at the LEGO Group, by a student from the Delft University of Technology. It was the student's assignment to take a look at how LEGO can enter the professional market with a product that combines LEGO with sheet materials. Within the project, product designers were defined as the target market. They use LEGO quite often in their work, but unfortunately, many times they end up confronted with the limits of the system. The project started with finding out how many product designers there are to address, what they can spend and what they need. The first needs were found by conducting 15 interviews among product designers. This narrowed the focus to where this project should go and where it should not. Main outcome of the interviews was that these people have workshop related problems and thereby are likely to use LEGO. They would like to see more flexibility in the LEGO system and get much more options for specific cases. These outcomes were used in the synthesis of concepts. In the synthesis phase several concepts were developed with the help of context mapping with another set of product designers. Their unmet needs became clearer and three concepts were defined. The concept that was chosen was based on flexible parts and parts that can attach the LEGO system to the 'real world'. This should stimulate designers to faster test their ideas and concepts on their desk or in the workshop and finally making product designs better. This concept was worked out to a final product+packaging proposal which was tested in the end with 7 product designers. Result is that the concept works, but some bricks should be tested again (but then) in the right materials and for a longer time. Finally, the whole product design was wrapped up in a business planning for the next 4 years. The first step is to launch small and to do more extensive research before the product can be scaled up to global market after 3-4 years. Expected is that this product, after investing and launching small can become a self sustaining business model that can deliver around 1-2 million euros each year in a mature market.

LEGO
Product Design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:28aec88e-9893-409f-9cfb-69b3558c106b

2011-10-06

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Verhaar, M.