Totally love this trip down memory lane from Frankie Roberto. Brings back big memories from my childhood. Anecdotally, I know many folks of my Industrial Design course attributed their interest in design to their early days playing with Lego. It is obviously a well used Experience Prototyping tool as well, as Sarah’s blog header indicates!
From http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/708
“I love the list of ‘fictional universes’ on Wikipedia. It contains everything from The Simpsons to Star Trek to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. The Fictional Universes database on Freebase is even better, as it contains thousands of details about the universes, such as species, objects, and even ethnicities.
Anyway, I thought I’d start to address this lack of understanding about the Lego Universe with a look at some of the companies and organisations that serve the Lego urban-dwelling minifigs. These mostly occur in the sets that have been variously title ‘Lego Town’, ‘Lego City’, and ‘Lego World City’ (I’m not sure whether this means there are multiple urban areas, or just one ever-growing one).”
Lego Train Logos (courtesy Frankie Roberto)
It’s a great read – thanks Frankie. It’s also got me thinking how important, these imagination driven ‘universes’ are. Do a whole generation of designer’s owe Lego, Playmobil and Mechano a big debt? What will the effect on design be of the latest generation of networked entertainment and computer games – will it encourage design collaboration and global interaction?
Will the increasingly vivid toys and computer games make the next generation of designers more or less imaginative?
How could toys be designed or redesigned to encourage and inspire the next generation of designers?