Lego: Here’s to the Future of the Good Stuff
(Photo, Model, and Lego interface by Oomlaut)
Legos are my first love.
About on the cusp of moving from high school to college I decided that if one of my possessions was going to survive me moving out of my parents’ house, it should be my Lego collection. So I took the big box of Legos that I’d kept in my closet, with its utter lack of organization and permanently-fused-thin-bricks and itch-inducing dust and I organized the lot of it (lacking EMS Labs’ tips, I did this by COLOR) into tubs, which I then made clear to my parents would cause me to run off to Portland to start a comics’ studio, should any harm come to them. (I almost did this anyway.) To this day, I hold on to them.
Lego has, over the years, proved itself to be a friend to the Maker movement, and I am hopeful that this will continue as 3D printers, which print in the very same variety of plastic used in Legos, inevitably begin producing Lego-compatible and very probably Lego-replacing objects.
At $8 a pound, 3D printed objects are cheaper than Legos, and although I’m pretty sure the legality of measuring Legos with calipers and putting Lego-compatible bricks into Thingiverse has already been settled by the knockoff MegaBlocks, there is still the question of the peripheral reaction of Lego to this development, which could either be positive or negative.
However, I am pretty close to dead certain that Lego will react to the first group of user-designed-and-printed Lego parts to show up on their radar with a show of support. When users hacked into the first generation MindStorms, Lego responded by rushing to their legal department to make sure that the EULA explicitly ALLOWED such modifications. Lego stands out as a rare company that, when faced with users altering and improving their product, rushed to make certain that nothing stood in their way, and partnered with those users to make the next generation even better.
The advent of cheap 3D printing will be a harder sell: this isn’t a tack-on project but the core stuff. And it’s not a piece of modification that makes the existing stuff more powerful. People will be able to print out Lego sets soon, for less than it would cost to buy them from Lego. But I still think 3D printers can ultimately help Lego, not hurt it, and I think the company will characteristically see ahead to this and join up with 3D printers just as they did with MindStorm hackers.
Here’s why:
A series of events are lined up to happen in the first half of this century which will look an awful lot like science fiction, and they’re going to have a very big impact on the way industry works. Digital fabrication may not, as I said earlier, destroy the factory, but it will very probably do some big, big things to what is made in factories, and why.
When personal fabrication crosses the threshold into normalcy, and when it has stopped being something limited to the Maker movement, a significant number of industries which previously existed as atom-linked ones will have been turned into bit-linked ones. (Newspapers are currently doing this and they are having trouble, but I don’t doubt that the fundamental utility of them will be preserved as they become purely digital things.) Legos will be among the products which become digital.
This prediction is on pretty solid ground, I think. Where a lot of the time we have to wave our hands and guess at what we will and won’t be able to make with our future 3D printers with their multiple-head extruders and circuit-paste spitting print heads, we already use ABS plastic, the stuff of Legos, to print our stuff. So we will be printing the Lego sets of tomorrow. Of this, I’m just about certain.
And how will Lego react? If they get a Thingiverse account, they just might become the most successful toy manufacturer, indeed, most successful industry in the transition to digital home fabrication. As members of Thingiverse (or something else similar, or, heck, even their own 3D printing-oriented site, although I hope they’ll link us), Lego would be able to give users templates for fitting 3D models to Lego bases, trade ideas with free designers, and generally participate in the creation of Lego-related online content.
From this group of users, Lego could hire the best as designers to work on Lego designs full time, designing content both free and paid. Lego spinoffs of course will be rampant and compatible with Lego’s brick specifications. But if Lego has already hired the best designers, from the pool of those most interested in the future of Lego…
Lego will always be the good stuff.
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Lenore Said,
April 20, 2009 @ 9:57 am
I think it will be quite some time before 3D print quality becomes good enough at low enough cost to replace something like Lego. The quality of Lego comes in part from their excellent manufacturing techniques, which is not yet approachable by 3D printers. Additionally, until 3D printers are given away with computers the way 2D printers are today, there will be people who cannot afford a printer, but can afford a Lego set. So, I don’t fear for Lego for some time to come.
John Baichtal Said,
April 20, 2009 @ 10:47 am
Interesting thoughts.
First, LEGO’s patent on their bricks expired years ago. As you mentioned, Mega-Blok has exploited this to rip the company off.
Secondly, the company is notoriously quality-conscious. When various toy companies ran into trouble last year for lead paint and so on, LEGO was immune — their production facilities are mostly still in Europe. LEGO simply couldn’t figure out how to move production overseas while keeping quality up. Therefore I think they would be disinclined to leave it up to users to print their products and HOPE it worked out.
Finally, as far as printing your own bricks, check this out: http://ldraw.org/ — CAD wireframes for every single LEGO element in existence.
(I’m writing a book about LEGO for No Starch Press, it should be out this holiday season.)
bvac Said,
April 20, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
This guy does a lot of custom parts for lego minifigs: http://www.shapeways.com/hisdesign?user_id=11290
When I was busy rapid prototyping stuff in legos as a kid, I always wanted a robot that would assemble them for me. Although I imagined a long conveyor belt where hands would drop down and place each brick into place, a cnc type machine would be welcome.
Allan Ecker Said,
April 20, 2009 @ 1:59 pm
When I wrote this post, I knew I was treading on hallowed ground– these are Legos after all. There are reasons these guys are the best.
I’m making some assumptions as with all of my Future Watch posts concerning print quality in the near future. However with Lego bricks, the technological hurdles are much lower than with many other predictions I might make, such as printed circuits and so on.
Lego’s quality control, which has always produced exquisite bricks, will protect the market share for a long time compared with other products. But in the end, where artifacts that can be made from inexpensive plastic stock are concerned, nobody will be truly safe from personal digital fabrication.
If and when digital fabrication gets cheap enough, good enough, and ubiquitous enough that Legos can be printed reliably and equivalently, it will mean a lot of shaking in the industrial world in general. If Lego keeps their ears characteristically to the ground, though, I’m not worried for their future even in a time when other companies are falling left and right to digital “shape sharing”.
Bvac and John, thanks for those excellent links, by the way!
Jim DeVona Said,
April 20, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
bvac: Some photos of those custom parts can be seen at http://news.lugnet.com/parts/custom/?n=195&t=i&v=a
As I mentioned on Twitter, some current custom part vendors include BrickArms.com and BrickForge.com. I believe both use injection molding (check out their FAQ pages for more details).
The LDraw.org library does not [yet!] include every part in existence, but there are certainly thousands. There is a rigorous review process for new parts, which you can monitor and contribute to at http://ldraw.org/library/tracker/. Incidentally, over the past few years the LDraw library has transitioned to a creative commons license. (Full disclosure: I’m a member of this year’s LDraw Standards Committee.)
Quality fit and finish is certainly a big issue for many LEGO fans. Even the consistency of official LEGO elements has been subject to criticism in connection with changes in LEGO’s production arrangements. In my opinion, these concerns are largely resolved (or over-reported), but the attention illustrates how tight the tolerances must be for a satisfying “building experience”.
Anyway, I hope and suspect that before long affordable 3d printing will be up to the challenge (if it is not already). I know I’m certainly thinking about building a MakerBot now to experiment with it myself!
One more relevant thing – LEGO already has a “Factory” service where you can order the pieces needed to build a model digitally designed by you or others. See http://factory.lego.com/. Maybe you could interface Thingiverse with LEGO Factory!
Neb Said,
April 22, 2009 @ 6:18 am
I can see this as being a good thing for all Lego users.
The people who work with Lego (I mean *really* work with it, as opposed to “kids play”) are probably smart enough to come up with new and good ideas for bricks and connectors that they want, but don’t currently exist. The makers of Lego could take note of any brick forms that are highly popular, say “why didn’t we think of that?” and manufacture them for commercial use. Of course, they’d still be making the popular blocks that everyone uses, but the less common types could be left to DIY (or some make to oder outfit).
Of course, there must be sixty-bazillion-odd pieces for Lego now, it’d be hard to imagine anything new!
Lego is all plastic | Run CNC Said,
June 3, 2010 @ 7:39 am
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