by Dan sat there in the room watching the kids play with a space probe rover that had six sturdy bases perfect for navigating imaginary planetary surfaces. The rover never used its wheels except once during the 30 minute “play test”.
Instead, the children “zoomed” the vehicle through the air, up and down, only briefly “landing” on the board to pick up aliens, and store them in the back compartment of the rover before being taken on back.
Talking to the kids afterwards, Dan asked what they liked about the set. “Oh, I really liked the car with the six wheels,” said one of the children.
“Yeah, but you didn’t use the wheels. It flew everywhere,” Dan replied. “Do we need wings like that to fly? Do we need to change the wheels and put wings on them to make a spaceship?”
“Don’t change a thing,” said the children. “Keep it exactly the same. We love this suspense.”
“But we need more foreigners,” they said.
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That feedback and other sessions like it, along with the results of a new global study, have begun to reshape—literally—the Lego Group’s products and its designers’ perceptions of what draws children to space. This year, the Denmark-based toy company used “space” as an overarching theme across its various product lines, a first-of-its-kind approach that has resulted in the release of more than two dozen new space sets this year. until now.
“We made some really cool products and launched them this year for space,” said Dan Meehan, Lego’s senior design manager and the creative lead for the new space sets, in an interview with Space.com. “I’m very proud of what the teams have done.”
Based on the company’s research, Lego found that 77% of children want to travel to space and 86% are interested in discovering new planets, stars and galaxies. In addition, more than 3 out of 5 children believe that there are aliens in space, and 64% want to meet one.
“I was really excited to see what we got back,” Meehan said of the survey. “The STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] side – the kind of side space enthusiasts, the children central space – still there. They, like me, are really into everything about space.”
“But there are a large number, a much larger number, of children who love space for storytelling. And that’s not storytelling in the sense of movies and TV shows, but storytelling in terms of the like, space is an infinite playground for imagination, and the possibilities are endless. They are called ‘space storytellers’ because they are using space as a canvas to be creative and imaginative and that has challenged us with the portfolio of products you see on the shelves now to push them a bit a little bit more,” Meehan told Space.com.
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An example of this was with the Lego City Space sets this year. In recent years, Lego has worked with NASA to style its space-themed Lego City products after the agency’s Artemis moon missions, basing them in the real world.
“This time around, when we did Lego Space City, we pushed the minifigure further than ever, and the same with the minifigures in Lego Friends,” said Meehan. “We wanted to look at, What if the Lego City team was exploring an unknown planet? We didn’t name the planet or say which solar system. They’re somewhere imaginary, they’re somewhere new. What would they do? ?”
“Because this is what kids were telling us,” he said. “This idea to discover the life and existence of aliens and different galaxies.”
What Lego has discovered is that even if they give children more realistic and accurate space vehicles to build and play with, there is no stopping their creativity and imagination. In another activity, the Lego Group invited a group of young fans from around the world to New York City to build their own vision for the future of space travel.
The company then surprised the children by adapting their designs to UPOs, or “Unidentified Playing Objects”, which took to the sky as part of a drone show over the Manhattan skyline.
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The children, aged six to 13, weren’t building traditional rockets or spaceships but instead a space bed powered by butterfly wings (complete with a snack drawer for long trips); a turtle spaceship that walks on the moon; dog spaceship with 360 degree windows; and a dinosaur with a jetpack, among other designs.
“Have 10 Lego designers in this room for a week and we’re still not going to come up with a bed with butterfly wings with a drawer for snacks as a space travel type,” said Meehan. “We’re going to be limited by aerodynamics, helmets and big support systems. Kids are just like, ‘I want to ride on a dinosaur with a jetpack.’
“The idea is to encourage kids that space is this limitless playground for their imagination,” he said. “They can then use their creativity to find what the future of space travel might be, because we don’t know, right?”
