🇩🇰 Everything is Awesome!
The one where I play with bricks and learn about a seamless digital experience
When you visit Lego House in Billund, the main thing everybody talks about is the cafe.
On the menu, each item has a picture of a Lego brick next to it. In front of you, a pile of Lego. You pick your combination of food and place those Lego bricks into a little machine on your table. That machine does something clever, senses what you’ve chosen, and sends the order to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, the screen lights up, and you’re told to collect your food from the friendly robots. You see your box (a large Lego brick, of course) making its way along the chute and down a conveyor belt. It arrives in front of one of the robots, who looks at it, looks at you, and gently push it towards you.
It was at this point the bloke next to me picked his up and immediately dropped the whole thing on the floor.
Robots 1 Humans 0.
Our trip to the home of Lego was one of the best customer experiences I’ve ever had.
In essence, it’s one huge immersive Lego experience exhibition. A whole building, full of Lego, split into several zones which all suggest different ways to play with the bricks.
But what made the experience so great wasn’t just that you could play all day and get fed by Lego Technic. It was the way that they made something that is so fundamentally analogue come alive with the help of the subtle, seamless use of technology
‘Who does digital really well?’ is probably one of the questions I get asked the most. I usually give a bit of a grumpy reply. After all, we don’t talk about ‘who uses electricity the best’, do we?
But right from the start, Lego got it right and proved me wrong.
When you arrive, you scan your ticket and each of you gets your own wristband for the day, complete with your name on it. You buzz yourself in, and you’re off, into a world of bricks.
The first thing you come to is a giant red wall, full of six-brick creations, and a huge bucket of red bricks to play with. Next to that, a big red machine with a wristband scanner.
It turns out, there are 935 million possible combinations of six red Lego bricks. Who knew! And every visitor to Lego House, well, they get their own one. You scan your wristband, it thinks for a bit, and ta-dah! You get your own, unique 6-brick combination. Your name gets flashed up on the screen, a card gets printed with your name and combo, and behind you, a machine churns out packets of six red bricks for you to take and make with.
My boys were beside themselves at the thought of having their own personalised Lego combination and immediately sat down to make their version. And when I say ‘my boys’, I of course mean me.
As you go through the exhibitions, being invited to make cars, design fish, and create flowers, screens are subtly positioned in the corners of the rooms. At any point, you can take a creation over, scan your wristband, and it’ll take a photo of you with it, to be collected with your other photos of the day. (I was particularly proud of this car, perfectly weighted to jump the bridge, one of the challenges in that room).
There were a few video screens around, too. In one exhibit, you’re asked to make a mosaic. You feed this into the machine, wait a few moments, and then there in front of you is your mosaic, dancing to music - alongside the last few mosaics that other people have created.
(And yes, I’m 41 years old, and I made the Arsenal logo. But you have to admit it’s good.)
At the end of the day, you arrive home, sit down, and an email arrives in your inbox. ‘Thank you for visiting LEGO house! Download your digital memories now!’
And right there in one place are all the memories of your day, all the snapshots you and your kids have taken in each room, any videos you made, and your personalised 6-brick combination. It even included a photo one of the members of staff had taken on their phone, meaning we had one of all of us together, along with a giant Lego Tyrannosaurus Rex.
A day spent playing with tangible, analogue bricks, brought to life in the most simple, unintrusive, and effective way possible.
And my buttered-fingered friends who spilt his food all over the floor? Within seconds, two real humans had appeared to clean it up. Within a minute, the floor was spotless, and a new meal was on its way to him down the conveyor belt.
Now that really is awesome.