KYLE POINTER
Product Design
LEGO City Fire & Rescue
A great project that I worked on at The LEGO Group was the LEGO City Fire & Rescue water pump. The pump was already developed as a potential new Lego element. When I joined the project, it was my task to develop the interaction between the water pump and the fire elements in the sets. I explored several ways to 'put out the fire' including knocking flames over, spinning flames, choosing where to position the flames in the set and how to 'hide' the flames once they have been put out. A popular way for children to play quickly became apparent, to knock the flames over backwards so they are flat, and not visible. In the above set, you can see how the flames can be knocked over on the burger tower, and then they are hidden out of sight behind the burger when they have been extinguished.
An important part of the project was testing the potential play experiences with children. Because the sets are all about the interaction between the fire and the water, it is the play experience that is crucial to get correct for young children, so we played with set with different groups of children throughout the development process. This was to see firstly, if the children could understand what was happening in the set and if they realised what they were supposed to be doing, and secondly if they could successfully put out the flames with the water pump. In the first session we realised that a lot of children could not understand the purpose of the water pump, and did not put out the fire, but once showed how it works, they quickly made it the focus of play experience to put out all the flames with the water pump. In other sets with shooters the children understood what to do, possibly because they were familiar with the shooters from other Lego sets. However, it was harder for them to put out the flames with the shooter as it requires more accuracy. Conducting the children's tests was interesting for me as I love research and analysing results.
Due to confidentiality Disclosures between myself and The LEGO Group I am unable to present any images of development or prototypes, only official final visualisations.