STUFF MEETS
Mike Psiaki
In our building we have a central warehouse that has every piece currently in production. I think it’s maybe 50 million bricks in there or something. Sometimes we’ll just walk around and look at individual pieces. And we’ll be like, “Yeah, that one is really nice!” and grab it for our project. A lot of the basic structural stuff, we already have. Lego models are all designed in this way where they stack upwards – we talk about it as a stacking system. But you can’t really start designing that way, so we’re very good at holding things delicately. And once you have that first version, then you need to start thinking about how it could be built from the bottom up.
We only have so many sizes of wheel, so you can pretty easily arrive at what size a car will be. You just look up the dimensions of the real car and figure out what is the track and what is the wheelbase, and then put together a sturdy frame connecting the wheels at the right spots – then you can start from there. On the Porsche 911 last year the most important thing was how to do the front shoulder, including the headlight: I know we can figure the frame out but it’s the angles and the subtle curves that are the challenge – to figure out how we’ll actually get each piece in the right spot.
We start to build digitally. That’s because we can hold all those things in space very easily, but it’s really hard to do in real life. And so you can start to get a feel of how everything will work together without having to figure out the frame that will hold it all in place. We can’t really know where the frame needs to be until we know what things need to attach to it and where they need to attach. So that is one big benefit of being able to work digitally. Sometimes we get overconfident in our abilities to imagine physics in the digital model – you can get to a point where this half and this half are connected just by one stud or something!
We give the models to other people within Lego to build first, not model designers. They’re not developers or designers, they just need to have an association with product development in some way – and the right kind of clearance levels to see the models! Over the course of development of instructions, there are s
