Category: Featured

If you’re a fan of LEGO by any stretch of the imagination, then there’s nothing like the feeling of marveling at a large brick build that’s been put on public display. But it could be even better if the LEGO construct was exhibited in a free-roam public place, like the brick-built Porg statues put in London’s walkways last year to promote Star Wars: The Last Jedi. One particularly notable display of publicly-accessible LEGO artwork is one called as Park People, the brainchild of artist-lawyer and LEGO Certified Professional Nathan Sawaya. He has already made this exhibit in public parks of several cities like Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas and Washington, DC. Now the next stop of Park People is the south, in Houston, Texas.

At the park benches in 1200 Smith St. outside the Allen Center, visitors may find a series of near life-sized LEGO brick-built people, each one using a single color scheme and posed sitting and relaxing on the benches. Park-goers are not only free to take pictures but also to directly interact with the Park People as if they were real.

Carol Watson, Events Manager of Brookfield Properties Arts which sponsored Sawaya’s Houston leg of Park People, notes the interactive and reflective nature of the LEGO figures on display. “I mean, you have the orange LEGO human who’s in lotus position,” she points out. “So, if you sit down, you can get in to a meditative state or you can sit down and have a conversation with somebody, but it’s also a way to engage with other people.”

Park People remains on display in Houston up until August 10, where it will take a short break before being re-exhibited at the Houston Center, 909 Fannin St., from August 13 to 24. Visitors to the LEGO figure displays may take photos and selfies, and play-interact with the Park People, but for safety considerations the organizers won’t allow eating and drinking, smoking, or climbing on the brick guys. There’s no price for admission.

Way back in May, we covered a unique new product service by LEGO that was developed in cooperation with the massive online marketplace platform Amazon. This was LEGO Duplo Stories, which works as a downloadable Skill for the Amazon Alexa smart speaker to narrate interactive stories based on recently released LEGO Duplo educational building sets.

This is merely one of several significant collaborations between LEGO and Amazon, and it apparently runs against the grain of what other companies on the online retail giant are doing which is plastering search advertisements. Instead, LEGO’s keener on content production for consumers on Amazon.

The LEGO Group’s Head of Emerging Platforms, James Poulter, is seeing the rising trend of Amazon Alexa owners using the smart speaker for online purchases; it’s telling over 80% of 2017 online sales combined for LEGO, Hasbro, Mattel and Nintendo were done courtesy of Amazon, according to a Jumpshot analytics study.

According to Poulter, other companies could do well to follow LEGO’s example of looking at Amazon as more than “just a retail platform”. While he does concede that there are risks to companies cooperating with Amazon to such an extent, one can’t discount the potential to be capitalized on, now that the retail giant is steadily increasing its variety of content services like Freetime Unlimited subscriptions and of course, Alexa.

To this, LEGO’s emerging platforms boss is seeing possibilities: in the vein of Amazon Alexa and its LEGO Duplo Stories, there would come a time when a customer’s LEGO order done on Amazon, for example, would have new Skills being downloaded onto the user’s Amazon Alexa speaker, which will then ask the customer if they were satisfied with their delivered service.

In addition to Alexa Skills, LEGO is also looking on developing AR options with Amazon as innovative means to sell more products, letting consumers preview their online purchases before committing to buy them, for example.