Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

You know, I don't think I've ever seen anything negative about Lego as a company in any serious way. Staff reports are uniformly 'this place is amazing to work', customers love their products, they've kept their product line diverse and with a wide, wide range of prices so there's no exclusionary practise. Good business practises for sure.

View on HN

As a child I was a huge Lego fanatic. I don't have much time for it anymore, but I still make a point to walk through the Lego aisle if I'm ever in a toy store.

One thing that I'm a bit saddened about is how it feels that movie tie-ins have overshadowed the other sets. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Batman, Avengers, The Hobbit... what I loved as a kid wasn't that I was building a replica of some fictional universe, it was that I could create the universe in my head as I was building it.

And yeah, the Lego Friends thing makes me rather sad. But that's not wholly Lego's fault; parents insist on segregating girls' toys from boys' toys, and Lego reacted to meet that demand. Who knows, with any luck maybe some of the girls who otherwise wouldn't be exposed to Legos at all will get introduced to Mindstorms.

And I still have to give them props for this ad from 1981:

http://cdn.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Awesome-198...

Personally, as a child, I would have loved the tie-ins because of all of the new specialized pieces that they make for them. The original sets never lasted for a super long time before it was all just component parts for building whatever I was building.

Lego was almost bankrupt a decade or so ago, and partnering with first Star Wars and then other properties helped save them. Don't blame them because kids have brands/IP shoved down their throat now.

I have twin 5-yo daughters and have bought only the space-themed LEGO sets for them. They've seen the "Friends" sets but really just want to build spaceships, airplanes, and cars. I guess I'm doing something right :)

I also have to admit that one of the reasons I bought the space sets was in case they didn't like LEGOs. That way at least I could have some fun with them. Now I have to share...

It's a shame the older stuff has gone out of fashion, but they had to do something to keep going. At one point a few years ago it seemed like they wouldn't survive. Fortunately it seems that the film tie-ins have worked so I'm grateful for that.

I wouldn't be so down on Lego Friends. My oldest daughter is a huge fan of Lego and has different sets that are Friends and some that are Star Wars. She combines them and plays with them together. Han Solo has a dog and a cat. One of the girls flies the X-wing. It's pretty cute.

Girls love role-playing and Friends provides another outlet for them. My oldest daughter loves building and then she plays with what she created quite extensively.

I find girl/boy toy segregation sad too, but I'm a woman and when I was 4 my first post-Duplo Lego sets were the early 80s "Lego Fabuland" series: anthropomorphic animal minifigs in gingerbread-looking houses with furniture and cookers and tiles with pictures of food on.

A few years later I was asking for every Lego Space set going and building planes and spaceships. The Fabuland bricks went in the big Lego bucket and would sometimes be repurposed as space station decor. So as an introduction to Lego for younger girls I don't really see a problem with it... though I'd prefer them to be less overwhelmingly pink.

"what I loved as a kid wasn't that I was building a replica of some fictional universe, it was that I could create the universe in my head as I was building it."

Completely agree, this really saddens me too. Played with lego so much as a kid and I never tried to build things from films. It should be about your own imagination

Some people [1] have linked the rise of Lego and the decline of Meccano [2] to the decline of manufacturing in the western world, as Lego doesn't teach Meccano's lessons about L section beams, diagonal braces, gantries in tension and compression, and so on.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1333215/Why-Britain-n... [2] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8Q-tdV67Suc/TfhcQxf63JI/AAAAAAAAAT...

I got my initial (entirely empirical) lessons in mechanics via Fischertechnik [1]. Absolutely the best toy, ever.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik

[p.s.: http://www.fischertechnik.de/en/Home/info/computing.aspx "programming is child's play" /G ]

I used to have a Meccano set from the early 70s, it was fantastic. I always thought it was a shame it never got as much attention.

And I thought construx were neat, that is one awesome construction set.

These Meccano constructors are similar to what we had in post-soviet Russia, although I've never heard that name. Then about the end of 90-s LEGO gained popularity, and indeed, 'soviet constructor', as we called these sets, stopped being sold.

I always wondered whether they were really suitable for smaller kids, considering smaller parts et al.

This is what our constructors looked like:

* Constructor parts: http://blogarchive.ru/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/konstruktor...

* Photos of the manual: http://vasi.net/community/kartinki/2009/08/25/sovetskijj_kon...

I was reminded of those too! I had the set in the 2nd photo, and remember building some of the things in the manual. Of course, as a kid, I quickly lost most of the bolts and nuts, so I can see the value of LEGO in the long run…

EDIT: Of course, in the spirit the typical ru-net, a lot of comments at that link are along the lines of "LEGO is for idiots, look at what we played with as kids".

But the beauty of things like Meccano is that if you lose bolts and nuts... you can just go down to the hardware store and pick up some replacements!

Although nowadays, it's trivial to order replacement Lego pieces online.

I am Russian and moved to the states when I was 1 year old. My parents would always talk about how our constructor here in the states compared to what they had in Russia. This is the first time I have seen a picture of it, now it all makes sense. It's really a bit funny for me because when I think about it, those sets are exactly what I expect from Russia.

Here's a design suggestion you're not likely to see in any modern American toy: http://vasi.net/uploads/podbor/sovetskyi_konstruktor/thumbs/...

I'm not sure if I am the only one, but some of the ads/banners/images on the second link did not appear to be completely worksafe; I didn't see anything really offensive, but you might caution people in case they don't want pictures of girls in swimsuits on their screen at work.

While mostly reasonable, I think this is brushing over two large sections of Lego's products: Technic and Mindstorms.

The pieces from Technic are much more Meccano-like, in that they don't all have studs on top, and there are holes down the sides of the pieces with "bolts" to connect them together at arbitrary angles. (And there is cogs, axles, chains and motors.)

Mindstorms is an actual real robot, in the hands of kids, along with a fairly well defined progression of methods of programming it[3] (the Lego supplied methods have several stages of simple/easy to more complicated/powerful, and the third party languages include C/C++ and so on). It is actually one of the major factors in my learning to program. Having a programmable microcontroller so tightly integrated into a 3D-printer-like system gives so much power and flexibility for experimentation, especially in the hands of intelligent 10-15 year olds, who aren't being stimulated by school at all.

As someone who loved/loves both his Meccano and Lego, I think the normal Lego < Meccano < Lego Mindstorms, in terms of promoting technical thinking & experimentation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Technic [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms#Programming_la...

And then there's the FIRST LEGO League competition [1], which takes middle- and junior high-level teams and these sets of MINDSTORMS and has them work together to build a robot for competitive play, teaching STEM principles on the way. There are thousands of teams all over the world, and it's a wonderful experience. The program is also a funnel into the high school-level FIRST Robotics Competition [2], which graduates into actual machining, CADing, programming, and so on, as well as community outreach and business skills from raising funds and structuring a sustainable team.

[1] http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll

[2] http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc

Likewise, Mindstorms was one of the big reasons I got into "real" programming. Before Mindstorms, I played with a lot of web stuff (mostly HTML and some gaudy JS). But with Mindstorms, I started doing real programming work. First with their "block builder", then moving into Not-Quite-C. Programming the Mindstorms was super fun and super frustrating...nothing quite like working on an embedded device with limited memory and processing as a 12 year old. Plus the robot itself would typically tear itself apart from too much torque.

Mindstorms also propelled me into science fair, where several of my projects were Mindstorm-based robotics. And science fair is what propelled me into science in general, leading me to a career in biology and computer science.

So, basically, <3 Mindstorms.

For those in the US, Meccano's are what are now sold here as "Erector" sets. The older Erector sets were actually a slightly different design from the 1920s by Gilbert, but those are long gone and sorely missed by many.

I wonder how much research the marketing team did on setting up their brand with that name, considering their consumers are parents and young children.

Erector sets were around long before the prurient connotations were made.

Half the fun I had playing with Lego when I was young was unfolding plots between the minifigs - you'd build something, then have your minifigs interact with it. I'm not really familiar with Meccano, but as I understand it there's no 'human' in it with which you can project yourself. Meccano can let you build cool items, but Lego can let you build cool items, an environment to put them in, and people to interact with both of those things. Lego seems more versatile in satisfying a flexible imagination.

Also, suggesting that the decline in quality of modern engineers is Lego's fault is an interesting variant on the usual 'kids these days' crotchety-old-man talk.

The latest 'Friends' range targeted at girls has received some bad press. Not much construction to do, all nail bars and shopping sort of sexism. Not the most serious bad press but its something.

I will admit I'd forgotten that, but mostly as it was complaints from consumer action groups rather than consumers, if I remember rightly Lego introduced it after parental request/requests from girls and saw a profit spike.

I don't particularly like the idea of Lego falling into gender categories as it's a toy for creative minds, but if the market wants something then the market wants something.

Some creative minds are more interested in nurseries and tea parties than in trains or robots. And it's natural for it to be so.

It's evident once you have some kids. I truly wanted that not to be the case, but reality bites.

For the PC crowd: This of course doesn't mean that girls will never play with robots or cars or that boys won't play with nurseries or tea parties. Of course a mix is healthy and should be encouraged. But the stereotypical preferences are truly marked in most cases, before parental intervention.

To be honest I think my biggest complaints about lego are cost and that it is hard just to get a big bag of basic bricks.

However I think the 'Friends' thing could have been better handled with modest tweaks. Why aren't there any boys/men in 'Friends'? What if boys want to play nurseries or tea parties.

When I was young the lego characters were mostly gender free but it seems increasingly that the 'boys' lego increasingly has male characters (even outside the branded Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings stuff). All the Firefighters and Police seem to be men when they could have been much more gender neutral (or mixed genders) without loss of fun to boys or girls.

That's not exactly true. Kids will play with whatever they want until they feel pressure to conform from either parents (if a girl asks for a toy, she's handed a Barbie) or society (marketing only showing girls playing with dolls, kitchen sets.)

You might think your child had no parental intervention, but parents are only one factor in enforcing gender roles. Are you sure you've kept them from watching TV, reading, and playing with other kids whose parents are not like you?

> with whatever they want

That's the key point. I've observed that ones tend to want one things and the others tend to want other things.

Of course there's cultural intervention, people do not live in bubbles, but it's much more subtle and, I believe, innate than what you think before having children (one data point: my daughter that I swore would never wear pink, actively prefers pink clothes, she wears other colors as well, but given a choice, usually chooses pink and from a really early age)

But there's nothing genetic that determines girls like pink more. It's all social. Your daughter probably saw all the toys and clothes directed at her being pink, all the positive attention she got when she wore that "cute" dress that happened to be pink, and all the little girls her age on television who she looked up to also wearing it.

I meant kids will play with anything. Dolls, trucks, anything their hands can get ahold of. It's only once their parents or society starts subtly and not-so-subtly telling them they should be playing with these toys and not those toys do they start having a noticeable preference. Boys aren't hard-wired to like trucks and girls aren't hard-wired to like EZ Bake Ovens. That's all society.

All I'm trying to say is that I was of your same opinion, but facts do not support that opinion in my experience. Of course I have not done an actual controlled experiment, just some observations and little tests along the years. Yes, they will play with anything, but they still show preferences. Are those purely social? I'm not sure.

That said, I am still of the opinion that it is indeed mainly social, but that it is less social than one thinks it is, before.

I'd love to see some actual science about this, got any?

I don't have the original study I read (back in a cognitive development class in college), but I believe this one[0] should suffice. The original was a study that monitored groups of kids playing with toys and found the kids didn't develop a gendered preference until parents began interfering with toy selection. If the parents didn't interfere, they wouldn't develop a gendered preference until school age where they began interacting with other children.

[0]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1990....

Yes, kids will play with anything. However, the way they use toys to play will be individual.

My daughter preferred cars and trucks while young (under 4 years). She would cover the garage with blanket for the night, put her small truck to swing etc. The style of play was very different from the way that I saw boys playing with similar toys.

Really? There's also zoos and a camping set, a few pet-oriented set, a farm, and a horse truck thing.

It's the best in-road they've made into "Legos for Girls" ever. I can finally buy my nieces sets that they're interested in.

"Legos for Girls" isn't a road that should even be on their map. Legos for Kids is their destination.

If your nieces weren't interested in the sets Lego should have focused on better sets that were still gender-neutral. That doesn't exclude zoos, camping, or pet orientation.

What it does exclude is antics like cancelling my friend's "tomboy"ish daughter's subscription to Lego magazine and sending her Lego For Girls Magazine instead, to her great upset.

Toy gendering is stupid and inane. Lego should have nothing to do with it.

If your nieces weren't interested in the sets Lego should have focused on better sets that were still gender-neutral. That doesn't exclude zoos, camping, or pet orientation.

Near as I can tell, the pet shop is gender neutral, and the "Lego Friends" sets don't appear particularly gendered:

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pet-Shop-10218

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/LEGO-Friends-Mias-Skateboard?icmp...

Similarly, Farnsworth House (http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Farnsworth-House-21009), the 4x4 crawler (http://technic.lego.com/en-us/Products/default.aspx#9398) and mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/products/default.aspx).

The fundamental difference between Friends and the rest of lego seems to be that Friends is about people, whereas the rest of lego is about building stuff.

> "Lego Friends" sets don't appear particularly gendered:

> The fundamental difference between Friends and the rest of lego seems to be that Friends is about people, whereas the rest of lego is about building stuff.

You can't say that Lego Friends marketing isn't seriously targeted at girls.

http://friends.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx

It's only targeted at girls if you believe that girls (but not boys) respond to female characters and themes of friendship. Similarly, regular lego is only targeted at boys if you believe boys (but not girls) respond to building stuff.

I have no trouble accepting the belief that boys and girls are different, and that building products which disproportionately provide utility to girls is beneficial. But if you disagree with this latter claim (as bonaldi seems to), then Lego is not actually targeting girls - they are merely targeting people who like friendship more than building stuff.

I understand what you mean but there is a lot of cliché in this homepage, pinky stuff, girls, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that friendship is for girl and construction is for boys.

I'm just saying that Lego Friends universe use some stereotype marketing

I would have been much less negative, if they included boys, girls, because, boys likes animals friends, pink as well as girl likes blue.

Lego: Please skip the stereotypes

It's targeted at girls because it uses all the signifiers of traditional stereotyped toy advertising, features only female characters and comes up via a special Lego For Girls page via the first Google hit on "Girls Lego" (for me, at least).

Lego may have a perception problem that it is "for boys" as mentioned upthread, but this is the worst way to redress that.

It is only natural that lego would have a "for girls" page that emphasizes product lines that they think girls may like. A lot of criticism has been leveled at Lego for being for boys only recently; I don't think an attempt to refute those allegations can fairly be said to mean that those product lines are therefore only for girls.

If I google "McDonalds communities" I get a corporate site that highlights to good McDonalds does for communities. Should I then conclude the chain is a community outreach program?

There's nothing stopping a girl from buying "boy" Legos. In fact, there are plenty of solid generic Lego sets available, and stuff like MindStorms, which is an awesome robotics kit, is not really gendered.

The problem is that Lego can't just market to kids, who have no innate idea of what's "supposed to be for boys" or what's "meant for girls" -- Lego has to market to 30+year old parents who have gender stereotypes embedded in their mindset, even some of the most progressive ones.

I think a slow transition is good, and having more toys for girls that involve building and creating is a good step forward, even if they're still a bit gendered.

I really appreciate their Friends series. My son had tons of legos of all kinds. My daughter, who is 5 now, played with Duplo, but refused to try regular Legos. They were for boys. The Friends set are a different matter. The fact that there are real characters, with names, is crucial to her. We went on the Friends website, and went through all the information about the characters. Knowing what their hobbies and favorite colors are might seem inane, but it let her connect. Then she can go and do imaginative play with the figures.

With my son, it was all about the construction. He didn't play with sets much once they were built. My daughter liked the construction, but got more out of playing with the sets and the figures once it was built.

Other parents are entitled to their views, but I think my daughter fits the behavior Lego was going for with Friends.

I agree on the marketing point. They could have one magazine with everything in it.

It seems like, and forgive me if I inferred the wrong thing from your comment, that you are implying that some of the toys aren't gender neutral. I don't have a problem with they beauty bar and things like that. Some girls like those things. So do some boys.

The marketing side I totally agree with though. For whatever reason when I was around 8 I wanted a Barbie. I can't tell you how much I got made fun of and picked on for that. I remember hiding it when friends came over so I wouldn't get made fun of. To my mother's credit though, she didn't really even bat an eye at the thought of me playing with a girl toy.

Toy gendering is neither stupid nor inane: indeed it's almost universal amongst animals who play with things identifiable as 'toys', e.g.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18452921

That's preferences expressed at an individual level. That's fine. The problem is when you say in aggregate "only girls will like this toy, you are boy, ergo you shouldn't want this" and have marketing that either excludes or strongly suggests the toy you want is Not For You.

See the comments in this very thread about boys bullied for playing with "girl" toys. That's the awful consequence of stupid and inane gendering.

So boys and girls do not exist, only kids? Because kids gendering is also stupid and inane? And later we will have only persons, not men and women? It is sad to see how people fail to see the difference between racism and merely acknowledging the race, the difference between sexism and acknowledging the gender. Or did I miss some new research which shows that we are all indeed unixes creatures with minor differences in dangling parts? Equality does not mean uniformity.

>Equality does not mean uniformity.

Thank you, I was trying to come up with that phrase.

LEGO is the opposite of uniformity. A kid can build any world with basic bricks: cute bedroom, lunar station, farm, torture chamber… whatever. And the torture chamber will be different from kid to kid. Just like with normal construction material, really.

Luckily, once the initial model is built and destroyed, all your son/daughter has is a pile of random bricks with which to build whatever he/she wants.

You seem to have missed some old research about how damaging it is for kids to be told the things they are into are "not for them", based on their gender.

How would we react here if somebody said "yeah, Vim is for women only", made a pink version of Vim and marketed it solely at women, in women's magazines? That's what Lego is doing.

Gendering toys is as stupid as gendering software. Sure, some toys may appeal to one gender more than the other, just like some software might. But that's no excuse for ever being exclusionary about it.

I think the sillyness of your comment comes from the imaginary line between, one the one hand, making toys that "may appeal to one gender more than the other" and "being exclusionary about it."

Is the fact that there's an aisle at Target full of pink stuff and dolls exclusionary, or simply grouping by appeal? If my niece wants to go down the Hotwheels aisle, she's certainly not going to be kept away.

And if the daughter I'm going to have here in a couple months wants to play with "boy" LEGOs, great! But I'm also grateful that if she doesn't, LEGO is trying to help me out in my quest to get her interested in their wonderful toys by making sets that appeal to typically more "girl'ish" sensibilities.

> If my niece wants to go down the Hotwheels aisle, she's certainly not going to be kept away.

She is, by other kids and Hotwheels marketing.

The line is not imaginary. See this very thread for examples of people bullied for choosing the "wrong" toys. If you build a toy that more girls than boys like, that's one thing. If your marketing says (either implicitly or explicitly) "this toy is for Girls", kids will pick up on that, and they will enforce it too.

The results last lifetimes. It results in adults unable to even see the exclusion as anything more than "grouping by appeal to typical girlish sensibilities". Which views they in turn pass on to their children, continuing the cycle.

Think about the world you want your daughter to live in. Do you want her to be told that "hacking is for boys" because tech appeals to more "typically boyish sensibilities"? No? Then look for the fundamental gender discriminations bullshit like that rests upon.

You can't change human nature with your "gender-neutral" ideals, no matter how hard you close your eyes and try. Boys are boys, and girls are girls. They are equal but different.

As someone else mentioned, the only criticism I'd level at them is that they decided to split the Lego magazine into boys' and girls' magazines. There's going to be children of any gender who enjoy the Friends sets as well as children who enjoy the Star Wars sets. No real reason to try and fit each child into one of those camps.

It does look better than I thought, maybe the criticism was overblown and/or they have responded.

I see a few vehicles and an inventing workshop so it doesn't seem too patronising now.

My daughter's favorite character is Olivia. They have profiles of all the girls. Hers says:

    I love:
    My friends, science, school, drawing, inventing things, nature, hiking, photography, history.

    I ’m also good at:
    Reading maps, navigation by the stars, building things, computers.

    I want to be:
    A scientist or an engineer.

I was very pleased they didn't all want to be pop stars. Olivia’s Invention Workshop is a great kit.

In that regard almost everything was sexism up and until the released of the friends series. Weapons, firemen, policemen etc etc.. I am happy that my daughter got to experience Lego like a girl.. and look, it works with the sons Lego as well..

Millinium Falcon meets Friends: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ia-V08uRi6Y/T8Mi2SzWVaI/A...

Jack Sparrow kisses before he enters the Beauty Salon https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-lODix9_sQBM/T5sLmfnEcMI/A...

And just like many girls wants it, accessories in every shape and color: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-12WsmYNOILY/T5sLjk6O3_I/A...

Back in the day the lego figures were pretty much gender free but the current firemen and policemen are exactly that (men) which is a little disappointing and completely unnecessary in my view.

There has been some criticism over their rather aggressive use of trademark to fake "patent" their designs after their original design patents had expired.

I also heard (so, unverified) that users of 3d-printers has gotten some of that attention.

So, great company to work with, great products, but clearly a bit overreaching in the legal department. How evil that makes them... meh, at least they are not trying to patent something that they themselves never created. Still wrong through.

I think there was a piece on hacker news attacking them a few months back for a shift in their advertising from being relatively gender balanced in the 80s to being very boyish today.

Other than that though I completely agree with you. They seem like a great company.

Have you never stood on a piece of lego? :)

It was an amazing learning experience.

When my wee boys stand on their Lego I see it as a wonderful teachable moment. Lego is a great company to provide me with so many educational opportunities.

When you as a child stand on Lego you learn that you should tidy things away when done, when as an adult you stand on it you learn that you need to have a talk with the kid about tidying things away. Or to tidy it away after you've built another spaceship.

And when an adult stands on it in front of the kid, the kid learns lots of interesting new words!

Lego: you're never not learning.

The only real problem I have with Lego is the price of some of the items. A cursory search will bring you across £500 Technic sets... which is utterly bloody ridiculous.

I used to jam those little castle Lego swords and spears into the stitching of the braided area rug in my bedroom, to create that authentic medieval battlefield look.

When my dad tromped on one of those things after coming off the evening shift, it was a learning experience for both of us.

Compared to the caltrops like device that is a standard UK power plug a mere lego brick is hardly likely to cause much harm.

I suppose this is the benefit of being a privately held business - you can adhere to your principles and goals without catering or placating the whims of public shareholders obsessed about this quarter's performance.

Any public company worth its salt would do the same thing. The positive PR generated would be completely justifiable if any shareholder was crazy enough to sue. It's the same reason that public companies give to charities or sponsor events.

I was a huge LEGO fan when I was a kid. I didn't have many themed boxes but the basic bricks were more than enough for a kid with a lot of imagination.

As a grown up, seeing all those incredibly detailed scenes and models created by fans pop up every now and then on the net has been fun to watch.

As a father, accompanying my kid through his discovery of LEGO was a treat and a great occasion to get into the "zone" for hours… with him.

I must say that I wasn't convinced by their Hero Factory stuff; thinking it was too inherently violent and left too little room for my kid's imagination. Now that he has 6 or so of those and spends hours combining their parts (adding LEGO elements here and there) into gigantic — and horrific — figures I can say that I misjudged them.

LEGO is just now (in process of) suing Czech Pirate Party on trademark grounds.

We (as in pirate party) made a pretty mediocre (IMO) ad before elections, which used CGI models that bore some resemblance to Lego figures.

They didn't like that. We think we are in the right; however, we don't particularly like LEGO corporation at this moment.

The ad was just on youtube and not in any TV or amything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com