Wired 14.02: Geeks in Toyland

Geeks in Toyland Lego built a global empire out of little plastic blocks, then conquered the wired world with a robot kit called Mindstorms. So when the time came for an upgrade, they turned to their obsessed fans - and rewrote the rules of the innovation game. By Brendan I. Koerner The email from Denmark was only a few lines long. "It basically said, 'We have an opportunity for you here, Feature: but we can't tell you anything until you sign a nondisclosure agreement," says Steve Hassenplug, a soft-spoken Geeks in Toyland software engineer from Lafayette, Indiana. The cryptic tone of the email from Lego headquarters hinted at something more than a simple customer survey, but Hassenplug didn't know what. Plus: Mindstorms: The Next Generation He guessed it had something to do with Mindstorms, Lego's programmable robotics kit. After all, he's a master at The Dream Factory assembling the plastic bricks into complex robots, like his wheeled, self-balancing machine dubbed the LegWay, and he's something of a celebrity in the Mindstorms world. But there hadn't been a Mindstorms update in nearly four years, and rumor had it Lego might abandon the product altogether. Intrigued, Hassenplug signed the NDA, received a username and password, and was ushered to a secure online forum. Even there, he found no official information - just an email thread between a few peers: John Barnes, David Schilling, and Ralph Hempel. Hassenplug knew them well from Brickfest, the annual conference where Lego zealots show off their most elegant creations, from massive starships and richly detailed cathedrals to giant bipedal robots. The four Mindstorms experts speculated as to why they'd been tapped and sworn to secrecy. Lego probably needed beta testers for a Mindstorms update. After lurking for a few days, Søren Lund, the director of Mindstorms, dropped in on the conversation. He told the crew that a revamped kit was, in fact, in the works. But Lego didn't even have a working prototype. It was way too early for beta testers; Lego needed a Mindstorms User Panel, or MUP, to help with the design. "I was surprised they were so early in their development, and I think everyone else was, too," recalls Barnes, an electronics engineer from Holland Patent, New York. "We realized that our input was going to be a lot more important than we had imagined." Over the next 11 months, right up to the January launch of Mindstorms NXT at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the four men were de facto Lego employees. They exchanged countless emails with Lund and his team, reeling off ideas for new sensors, redesigned input ports, and stabilized firmware. The MUPers also met with Lund at Brickfest in the US and at Lego's Denmark headquarters to hash out specs for the computer that serves as the brain of every Mindstorms creation. The one key difference between the four panelists and actual Lego staffers: a paycheck. For their participation, Hassenplug and his cohorts received a few Lego crane sets and Mindstorms NXT prototypes. They even paid their own airfares to Denmark. That was fine by Hassenplug. "Pretty much the comment from all four of us was 'They're going to talk to us about Legos, and they're going to pay us with Legos?'" Hassenplug says. "'They actually want our opinion?' It doesn't get much better than that." Such loyalty isn't unusual among the fanboys who've swooned over Mindstorms since its 1998 debut. Four years after its release, version 2.0 still sells 40,000 units a year at $199 a pop - with no advertising - and has become Lego's all-time best-selling product. The market is almost evenly split between parents buying the kit for their budding engineers and grown-up geeks who build Mindstorms robots that can scale walls, solve Rubik's Cubes, or pick blue M&Ms out of a pile. The kit, due in stores in August, looks nothing like 2.0 and isn't backward compatible. Users still program the bots from their PCs, but everything else about the experience has been changed. The centerpiece of a Mindstorms kit is the RCX brick, which acts as the robot's brain. It receives input from sensors and sends instructions to motors, breathing life into plastic-block creatures. The new brain has a 32-bit processor - a huge upgrade over the old 8-bit processor - allowing NXT bots to perform more-complex tasks than their predecessors, like ambling with a near-human gait or reacting to voice commands. The chunky yellow brick in the old kit - which looked like SpongeBob SquarePants - is gone, replaced by a gray rectangle that could be the love child of an iPod and a first-gen Gameboy. The programming language has been revamped, as have the sensors, motors, and I/O ports. As a result, Mindstorms NXT robots look and act far more realistic than their predecessors. But the boldest part of the Mindstorms overhaul is Lego's decision to outsource its innovation to a panel of citizen developers. Relying on the MUP is a gamble that Lego hopes will lead not only to a better product but also to a tighter, more trusting bond between corporation and customer. Let me borrow your tools there," Lund says, reaching across the table and motioning toward my pen and notebook. We're talking Mindstorms over beers and bland Danish food at the Hotel Legoland, steps from the company's modest offices in the sleepy town of Billund, Denmark. Lund, 37, speaks English at a lightning clip. He's been trying to explain how NXT pieces will differ from those in the 2.0 kit. He's now decided to illustrate the point. I slide my notebook over to him, and he begins drawing the classic Lego block, the so-called two-by-four that was used in Mindstorms 2.0. Then he draws a piece from the new Technic line, a flattened tube pocked with holes - what enthusiasts call a "studless Lego." They'll be included in the NXT kit. Connected by tiny rods, the Technic pieces give the robots a sleeker, less boxy look. "We wanted to create robots with more personality," Lund says. "We wanted them to go from being more mechanical to more human." Lego also wanted to create buzz with its new product, and that meant doing more than just freshening up the last version. In early 2004, when the company hatched the idea of a new Mindstorms, it was coming off its worst year ever - a $238 million loss in fiscal 2003. There were plenty of strategic blunders behind the dismal results: a misguided foray into making PC software games, expensive licensing arrangements (chiefly with Disney), and designs that puzzled rather than entertained. "We had started to make fire trucks that look like spaceships, building systems that no customer could truly appreciate," says Mads Nipper, a Lego senior vice president. "We had to clean that up." Cleaning up meant ditching the software division, halving development times, and slashing product lines to Feature: reduce the number of unique pieces being manufactured in Billund from 12,400 to around 7,000. Meanwhile, Geeks in Toyland Mindstorms was in limbo. The RCX bricks are expensive to manufacture, and Lego's specialty is toys, not electronics. But sales were still strong, and the company was enjoying good publicity from the First Lego Plus: League, a program in which teams of schoolchildren compete to build the best robot. All told, Lego officials say Mindstorms: The Next Generation that nearly 1 million Mindstorms units have reached the market, a figure that includes retail sales and giveaways. The Dream Factory So Lego asked Lund to come up with a new version that would attract as much attention as the original, which sold 80,000 in its first three months back in 1998. Instead of cobbling together a 3.0 version, Lund decided to make a clean break with the past. Mindstorms' main flaw, he believed, was its complexity; many kids lost interest before completing their first robot. (The complexity had another unintended effect - Lego ended up with far more adult users than it originally anticipated. One company survey from 1999 found that 70 percent of Mindstorms users were adults.) Lund wanted novices to be able to construct and program a robot in 20 minutes. The biggest barrier to making that happen was the Mindstorms programming language, known as RCX-code. Though simple by computer science standards, it was too frustrating for many programming neophytes. The drag-and-drop commands - green shapes labeled with instructions like "Set direction" or "Set AC power 8" - could be confusing to link together and made it hard to program a bot to do anything more than move forward or backward. But Lego didn't have the expertise to write more intuitive software in house, so Lund turned to National Instruments, an Austin, Texas, programming firm that specializes in creating user-friendly coding tools. Hiring outside help was a change for Lego, a family-owned company that has historically kept its own counsel. Sometimes it takes a nine-figure loss to convince management to rethink its insularity. National Instruments designed a programming system made up of intuitive icons (like a microphone to represent the kit's sound sensor). "I call it Photoshop for robotics, or goofware," says Paal Smith-Meyer, a Lego creative director. "You just look at it and you know where to start, and you know how to goof around and have fun with it." The Mindstorms team tested the new language by asking the members of Lego's executive board to play with an NXT prototype.

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