Lego’s Smart Bricks aren’t just an experiment — and they aren’t just for kids

Julia Goldin, The Lego Group’s top executive in charge of product and marketing, will not commit to anything that hasn’t already been announced. She will not promise that Lego’s new Smart Brick — touted as the company’s biggest invention since 1978 — is the future of Lego. She won’t say if any future sets will feature the tiny sensor-packed computer bricks, much less whether they’re core to attention-grabbing brand expansions like Lego Pokemon.

“We’re not betting the farm that this is the future of everything,” she tells me. “We are not tied to it,” she adds later.

But in a 30-minute interview, she hints again and again that Smart Play — in which bricks have light, sound, and the ability to detect movement — isn’t an experiment but rather a “tremendous opportunity for the future,” and that it isn’t just for kids. Goldin presided over The Lego Group’s massively successful expansion into sets for adults, including $50 flower bouquets and $850 Millennium Falcons, and she says she has “no doubt in my mind these bricks will eventually make their way into adult sets as well.” And when they come to adult sets, she hints the Smart Play initiative might “bring a different meaning” to them.

Goldin says the Smart Brick and Smart Play are a “platform” that will “evolve,” that the Lego Group “will continue to develop it into the future,” and that it’s “already put a lot of plans together” for that possibility.

But also, she says the company sees it as an optional part of that future, something that Lego fans can engage with, or not. The Smart Bricks and tiles will be multi-purpose tool in a Lego builder’s toolchest. Today, a bunch of Lego hot dog pieces can be turned into flowers when you attach some petals; tomorrow, a medical scanner smart tile can turn into an alarm when you attach it to your Lego city’s police jail and a minifigure tries to escape.

Goldin says there may be all sorts of intriguing combinations in the future as Lego produces more interactive tiles and minifigures, too. She asks me to imagine what happens when smart Lego Star Wars minifigures meet smart Lego Marvel minifigures — a crossover event, perhaps? (Lego partner Disney controls both universes, so it seems quite plausible.)

When I ask if we’ll see very specific, character-aware interactions — the way Sonic the Hedgehog could recognize Doctor Who’s Sonic Screwdriver in the 2015 Lego Dimensions game and comment on it — she suggests to some degree yes: “These moments will happen, some designed by us, but majority designed by our fans.”

For now, it sounds like “designed by fans” means finding specific combinations of premade tiles and interactions that do something surprising and fun. It’s not just sounds like the quack of a duck or the hum of a lightsaber: if a tile designates a Lego creation as a “vehicle,” it won’t just make driving sounds; it’ll be able to crash into things if it stops suddenly, “refuel” if presented with a fueling station, and more.

If you fly a Lego aircraft with a smart brick up and down repeatedly with the right tile attached, it might sound an alarm, says Goldin; if there’s a smart pilot minifig inside, too, the pilot might react by audibly freaking out. It’s not limited to 1:1 interactions of a single brick and tile, but you do have to rely on Lego’s foresight some because they’re not user programmable.

But Lego Creative Play Lab director Tom Donaldson isn’t ruling out the possibility of programming your own. He says he thinks fans will absolutely want that, it’s just “not where we want to start,” and the Lego Group needs to figure out a really safe hack-resistant environment “before we get to a plan like that.”

When I ask if the idea is that every Lego theme — City, Space, Castle, etc — will eventually have smarts, Goldin demures again. “It could be, we don’t know yet, we don’t know where we’re going to take it,” she says. But she also says she expects the very behavior of the Smart Brick and its interactions may change and evolve as Lego gets more feedback. “That’s the beauty of this system: it’s software, it’s firmware, and we can modify it, we can adjust. If there are certain behaviors people really want, we will start developing features that address those behaviors.” (The Smart Bricks are updatable via an app, over Bluetooth.)

When I ask about the risk of Lego betting too much on such a system, pointing out how Lego once almost went bankrupt after trying too many innovations, she compares the Smart Brick to a game console, and these first Lego Star Wars sets as launch titles for that console. “When you build your game, do you take a risk? Yeah, because you invested in developing the game, but if that game doesn’t work, you produce another game, or you evolve it.”

“And that’s what we have the opportunity to do here,” she says.