LEGO has developed a wide range of tools to help its designers, development teams and the wider business to apply its Design For Business process. The process is explained on colourfully illustrated posters and leaflets, and a series of standard templates is used by the development teams to allocate tasks, record progress and present the results of each phase of the design process.
For example, the Foundation document is a standard Microsoft PowerPoint template used by development teams to present their ideas. The template helps the teams to explicitly link their proposals to the original business goals and objectives. The designers then use a standard roadmap in poster form to monitor their progress through the design process aligning with other activities in the project also mapped in the same roadmap.
LEGO is in the process of building two additional support tools to help designers to converge rapidly on the best solution for a given problem.
The first of these is LEGO Design DNA, a tool to manage the design language of each product group, ensuring both that products designed for a particular group work cohesively within it, and that the different product groups remain distinct from one another.
LEGO Design Practice is a knowledge base of tools and methods to help designers identify, use and share best practice in their design process. The system covers everything from research, validation through build ability and stability criteria to the quality of the building instructions and user testing.
LEGO also uses a bespoke 3D CAD tool that, combined with physical modelling, helps its designers build virtual concept and final models of new designs. The tool has huge productivity benefits, says Paal Smith-Meyer, Creative Director, not only because it speeds up modifications compared to building physical models, but also because the finished CAD model is used extensively by the wider organisation. 'The 3D team use it together with the communication department. This allows them to quickly work on close to final art and basis for box design, communication material, building instructions, ability to also use different versions that can become assets on the web site or in animation production.'
In addition to its core team of designers, LEGO has a group of 15 designers in a concept lab, with the aim of identifying opportunities to deliver more radical products that redefine particular markets. The concept lab operates on a different cycle to the core LEGO Design For Business process, producing quarterly reports on novel ideas that are evaluated for possible inclusion in later production products. The concept lab exists, says Smith-Meyer, because 'we need to continually explore entirely new ways of using our systems for future product offerings, allowing core business to focus on optimising existing offerings.'
Today, the D4B process and tools are at the core of the entire development organisation and will continue to expand into other areas of the organisation. As pioneers of this process, the development department was the first to institutionalise the new approach, which will in future form a core part of the induction process for new design staff and core team members.
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