Lego
From Mod Mania
For a PDF version, click here http://www.openobject.org/modmania/images/b/bd/LegoModded.pdf
'LEGO “PLAY WELL” LEGO meaning “Play Well” when taken from the Danish phrase “leg godt “ is something most people have spent hours playing with, everyone, at some stage in their lives has had a LEGO set, or played with the toy. LEGO’s success is largely due to children’s creativeness and their hyper-active imaginations. LEGO for children is an Open-Source toy. The company has given them the cod (blocks), and how they are compiled (constructed) is purely up to the child. The basic idea of LEGO features around little plastic interlocking bricks, easily snapped together and pulled apart to construct buildings, cars, aircraft, dinosaurs and anything else you can conceive. Ole Kirk Christiansen, the creator of LEGO was born in 1891 in Denmark. In 1916 Christiansen bought his own woodworking shop and works as a carpenter, until 8 years later when his shop burns down, Christiansen then purchases a larger shop and continues work as a carpenter. Due to the depression in the 1930’s Ole Kirk’s shop nearly goes bankrupt, and because of a lack of carpentry jobs, he starts making toys. 1934 saw the name LEGO come to be the company’s name. Until 1947 LEGO had been making only wooden toys, primarily pull toys, but Christiansen but the first plastic molding machine in Denmark and in 1949 begins producing Automatic Binding Bricks that were similar to today’s LEGO. From then the company began creating the now famous pieces and sets, which has made them a global toy company, with corporation head quarters in several countries. And Ole Kirk’s grandson is currently the Vice Chairman of LEGO.
Over the years the basic concept of LEGO has remained unchanged, but the themes changed, creating new themed Lego kits, from ‘Harry Potter’ to the ‘Bionicles’ all in a bid to accomplish the Lego Groups idea and vision “To inspire children to explore and challenge their own creative potential”, so thus building with LEGO bricks is about “learning through play”.
In 1996 Polish artist Zbigniew Libera born 1959 created the LEGO concentration camp, which is made up of a set of 7 boxes. When the bricks are assembled the finished product can resemble the image of a concentration camp. The kit also featured crematories, gallows and doctors administering electric shocks to prisoners. The figurines of the prisoners (skeletons) and the doctors was taken from other LEGO kits such as “pirates" which were then slightly modified by Libera. What made this LEGO concentration camp so controversial was for its many reasons. At the time the LEGO Corporation donated thousands of LEGO pieces to artists around the world who were part of the Lego art competition; they gave Libera LEGO bricks for free without knowing the full intentions of what Libera was going to do with the bricks. At first when Libera requested for the LEGO bricks he planned to make sets for prisons and hospitals but then the project evolved into the concentration camp. He then led to include another controversial matter by adding a notice on the box kit saying, “sponsored by LEGO systems”. The LEGO group insisted they did not support his artwork, and responded by saying “If he had described his ultimate project to us in advance, he naturally would not have received a single LEGO element from us!”
LEGO has gone from being a child’s toy to being an artist’s medium. Today there are works displayed in museums/galleries, displaying artist’s works who have taken LEGO bricks to another level. Artist Nathan Sawaya is one such person. Like the most of us Nathan Sawaya’s first encounter with LEGO was when he was a child. From getting his first set of bricks, he soon transformed his living room into a “LEGO city”, a city where his creativity and imagination were unlimited and developed. It wasn’t until 2004 when Sawaya come to national attention as a talented artist, when he won a national wide search for a professional LEGO master builder. Competition sponsored by the LEGO Group. Sawaya then quit his job as a Wall St attorney to pursue his passion for art (using LEGO as his medium). Sawaya’s LEGO work is in such exceptionally high levels that even the “LEGO Group recognizes his efforts and have the ability to not only use the LEGO name and copyrighted logo, but have earned an in-depth relationship with the company”. There are also 5 more artists in the world that has those recognitions also. A wider community of LEGO consumers is the AFOL or Adult Fans of Lego, for most people playing with LEGO stops as they get older, but for some, such as an AFOL, the interest continues into an almost overboard obsession. Communities then develop such as LUGNET.com. Here AFOL’s create their own masterpieces, generally not for art as mentioned before, but taking their childhood creations of cars, tanks, aircraft, houses to the most realistic extreme where the amount of LEGO is nearly unlimited. Many users create their own sets, then create instructions for fellow members to follow.
But a problem arose; sometimes the creator’s visions were outside of their limitations creating a literal city is very difficult and incredibly expensive. To solve this problem several pieces of software were developed, LDraw, MLCAD, Bricksmith and LEOCAD are just a few. What are they? Quite simply a LEGO cad program, with a huge parts library of nearly every existing LEGO piece, and it has the abilities for users to add their own parts.
But with all this user created content that people want to share, where and how can you get them online? This question was answered with the creation of Brickshelf. An online gallery created purely as a host for LEGO creations Brickshelf was around before sites like Photobucket and Flickr came into massive popularity, and its design and interface hasn’t really changed since its inception. LEGO has always been a medium for children to create stories, and why should it stop there? The snapshot of a Brickshelf gallery above is a photo sequence depicting an imaginary battle. In association with Steven Spielberg, LEGO release a line called LEGO Studios. Inside the largest kit you received a low quality Logitech webcam, albeit placed in a LEGO designed shell, and a cut down, easy to use version of Pinnacle Studio, re-branded Lego Studios. The program worked of the idea of Stop Motion Animation, where you take a photo of a Lego figure, move his arms slightly or legs, then take another picture, when played back in a sequence the illusion that the LEGO figure can move on it’s own is created. Lego Studio functioned on 5fps (Frames Per Second) which was good because 5 pictures amounted to one second, so movie creation was quick, but standard films round at 24fps but 5fps was noticeably jerky, and coupled with the webcams low quality, many films are very hard to watch. But from this program a community developed.
The largest community is that at Brickfilms.com. The site was founded as a forum and a website with links to films. But as the community grew simple HTML wasn’t enough, members coded a PHP controlled site, with a database that members could send in their own films. Early examples of films are pretty hard to watch, but technique’s quickly developed. Lego Studios was scrapped for software that could shoot at higher frame rates, the standard is 15fps, thereby increasing the work load. Applications like Adobe Premiere and After Effects became commonly used. Effects such as blue screening and CGI began to be incorporated. Every year Brickfilms sponsors a competition and various other competitions have arose over time. The major competitions over the years have been “Words of Wisdom”, “A Peculiar Event”, “High Adventure Theatre” and “Fame, Infamy and Glory” contests to name just a few.
Members of the forum have even created their own contests, such as the 24hour contest, where a theme is given out, and members have 24hrs to submit a finished work. 24hrs to produce a stop motion film is a short amount of time, and the competition has thrived due to the challenge, it is now sponsored by the website officially. The is even an awards ‘night’ on the site called the BAMPA’s Brickfilming Achievement in Motion Picture Arts, this is accomplished in a chat room hosted and coded by one of the sites members.
Another use of LEGO which would never have been imagined by Ole Kirk, is its use for creating robots. The Mindstorms line was originally released in 1998. Mindstorms combined parts from varying LEGO lines, the most dominant are Technic and regular blocks. Mindstorms was composed of a control block, about the size of a CD but rectangular and regular size blocks fitted with motors. The current version, the NXT was released in 2006 which includes many more features than the previous model such as touch, light, sound and ultrasonic sensors. NXT provides a cheap framework for users to create their own robotic creations, for which they are frequently used. The uses for LEGO in relation to modify and creating new objects are limitless.
A quick search of the Hack a Day website, http://hackaday.com/?s=lego reveals many and varied ideas. LEGO has been used to make rubber moulds of objects, to creating a game control headset, where the user moves their head, and the movement is sent through a NXT unit to the computer, and a similar movement takes place inside of the game.
Lego today is not just simply plastic building blocks for children, they have become the building blocks of creativity and invention for children and adults alike, teenagers creating movies, and hobbyists creating new technologies.
