Jon Simpson
Interview with LEGO Concept Designer, Bjarne Tveskov
Old interview from BoingBoing Gadgets with Bjarne P. Tveskov, who worked as a model designer at LEGO in the 80’s and 90s. This part caught my eye:
Maybe the model were to replace an existing set or maybe there would be some other requirements. But there would always be a fixed “brick-budget” one had to stay within. That was often the hardest part; If the model was over budget, one had to simplify and sometimes strip all the little cool extras of the models. Each brick has an internal price, and there was a whole department that did nothing but calculate the prices of all the prototype models we designed.
I’d always thought the way LEGO’s pre-built sets were constructed was extremely efficient and always made best use of the shipped blocks - the principle was clearly heavily baked in.
Running into this interview also reminded me of Gizmodo’s post on the vault containing every LEGO set ever released.