The LEGO Idea Box: an interactive creation that I built from late 2022 until early 2023 as a rejected submission to LEGO Ideas. The reason why this project took so long to complete was that it underwent numerous trial and error revisions which eventually resulted a simplified, streamlined project. It’s inspired by the legendary LEGO Idea Book of 1990, which you’ll hear more about below.
As mentioned before, this was created for submission to LEGO Ideas, but sadly was rejected due to mixing too many LEGO themes. I also worked tirelessly to perfect this overall concept since last fall, and made several revisions. With that said, I wanted to conjure up the imagery of the whimsy and innovation from earlier days of LEGO-building before licensed themes and overly complicated sets became the norm.
On the surface, this blue box with multicolored outer design seems like a large LEGO brick, but actually unfolds into four small vignettes to pay tribute to the legendary LEGO Idea Book of 1990.
The book was a publication containing numerous alternate instructions and photos to encourage young builders to think outside the box and use their LEGO pieces to make new creations different than the ones provided in model sets. As a kid in the ’90s, I would stare at this book all day and dream about the elaborate creations I could build if I owned enough pieces, and it helped inspire me to be a photographer.
At the time of the 1990 book, there were only four dominant themes in the LEGO System: Space, Town, Castle, and Pirates. This era predated licensed themes like Star Wars or Marvel, and instead was focused on imagination rather than intellectual properties. The front and back of the book contained a blue background with multicolored shapes, and on the front cover there was a sculpture of a group of realistic humanoid LEGO minifigures representing the four themes: a spaceman, a pirate, a medieval knight, and two construction workers. Therefore, the minifigures in my Idea Box are a direct reference to the book’s cover.
I began working on this project in late 2022, but struggled with the original functionality of the box since I intended for the four side pieces to unfold and fold automatically with the use of a Technic gear train. Essentially I conceptualized and tested a mockup where a central column in the box contained rails, rack gears, and a gear train which rotated the four sides at fixed angles. In the basic tests, this function worked by pushing the central column down (similar to unfolding an umbrella – but upside-down), but when adding deadweight of the vignettes on each side, it created problems for the mechanism. The momentum from leverage of pushing down on the column caused the four sides to fall down rapidly, so to slow it down I added Technic friction pins – but sadly when pulling the column back up, the force was so strong that it ripped the column from the rails, or even jammed the gears. Pulling the four sides manually (with the central column still intact) also didn’t work, as all four sides needed to be raised simultaneously, otherwise the central column and and rack gears would get dislodged.
After too many failed attempts, I scrapped the automatic mechanism and instead retooled the project to unfold manually by simply pulling the sides and central lid platform down. This ended up being the most efficient option. The only real design flaws in this project are how the sides are kind of heavy and bulky, and often times they bow out when reassembled back into the box form; this can be seen in closeup photos where the sides look partially open.