A level DT project for lego fans

[BLOCK32]

hi, im currently working on my Design and Technology project for mu coursework and a wiritng on here to ask a large group of lego fans to be able to tell me thwir problems with collecting displaying building and anything involving lego collecting that you have an issue with. It would be great if i could have some ideas to help me decide on my focus for my product by identifying a major problem for collectors

if you end up submitting a response thank you for your time and ideas this will be very useful 

[Toastie]

Hi,

don't really know where you want to go with this; as a "project" that you chose (right?), you certainly should have a focus - if so, what would you personally like to focus on?

As I don't know what the format of this project will be (written report, if so, approximately how many pages; other formats?), it is hard to make any suggestions ...

If it were any piece of written work, the introduction could assess the topic "LEGO: Building vs collecting". This topic alone can fill uncountable pages, but you could tailor your introduction towards your "Design and Technology" task. What readily comes to mind in that regard is: "Space, the final frontier (James T. Kirk, 1966)" ... 

But there is more, there always is ... "All the things I could do, If I had a little money (ABBA, 1976)" - and so on and so forth ...

All the best,
Thorsten 

[BLOCK32]

the project is part written but also building a product that tackles a problem and i wanted to place a focus of my topic on lego so would like to know some of the general problems fans that arent just me or my friends have. so if you could perhaps tell me soem of the problems you personally face as a fan of lego then that could help point me in a direction of where to go with the product i design

 

[CastleRail]

1 hour ago, BLOCK32 said:

the project is part written but also building a product that tackles a problem and i wanted to place a focus of my topic on lego so would like to know some of the general problems fans that arent just me or my friends have. so if you could perhaps tell me soem of the problems you personally face as a fan of lego then that could help point me in a direction of where to go with the product i design

 

For me, storage.

What I would love is for a modular storage system - a system that can attach extra compartments on each side as suits the space, that have multiple compartments that can be combined to form larger sections in any direction.

So I guess a back board with pin holes where you pick a hole for the pin and each pin can be connected to the left./right/up/down to an adjacent pinto form a side of a box. Form any regular sized box and then into this box a drawer. So for instance a 1x1 square could hold a drawer of 2x2 plates, when it is too full, expand the hole and the drawer to 2x1 etc. Then when you have so many 2x2 plates so it is becoming hard to find break it down again so a 1x1 of red, a 1x1 of black, 1x1 of grey etc. I would cover walls in this. Over shelves, under tables, if there's a gap I could use it.

[1963maniac]

Space is the final frontier for me too! It was needed at the beginniing of my collection and still is needed. After over 60 years, I have used many kinds of storage because of a growing collection, always growing. I do not display much of my Lego. Most of it is unbuilt. Selling my Lego has never been an option for me. I have come to the conclusion that I may have to start selling some Lego in order to have room for the new that I want. For me my Lego collection is starting to run out of space. Whenever I buy any Lego now, I have to consider also how I will store it.  What will be the storage cost in addition to the cost of the Legos?

[avensis]

I also agree with this idea, this system will be a big plus.

Edited January 6 by avensis

[ShaydDeGrai]

As a former engineering professor sitting in a very cluttered office/Lego room I can see plenty of opportunities for design projects ranging from simple product improvements to robotics and automation to better software depending on what sort of things a student would like to focus on.  These include:

Storage: I use trays, bins, boxes, baggies, parts cabinets and pick-brick-wall cups and there's never enough.  Moreover access is a problem, I can only have so many things open on my work table at one time so I'm constantly shuffling.  A (very) long time ago I took a class in printing (as in movable lead type loaded into a shoe printing not send the pdf to the laserjet printing) and I remember how we'd have a call sheet that told us we needed 17 'e's and 12 's's etc. and we'd just go to the font cabinet and fill up a tray in one go with exactly the parts we needed then sit down assemble the shoe.  I've always thought it would be nice to have my collection so organized with convenient storage systems that I could do that with Lego rather than spending more time rummaging and swapping parts trays than actually building.

Sorting:  There must be several Megs worth of posts on this site alone about sorting; by color; by shape; by function; by family;  It is an endless (and often thankless) task. Wouldn't it be nice to have a machine where you could just take a scoop of random parts, set a few preferences on a control panel and have the parts all sorted exactly the way you feel would be most useful for you and your building style?  Just doing a fraction of the job would be a help (I had one student once who used Mindstorms to build a machine to sort Technic pins, perfecting that design took an entire semester).

Cataloging: There comes a time in every collectors life when s/he doesn't remember what he or she owns anymore, or worse, is absolutely certain that s/he has some of Part X in color Y but can figure out where, in a sea of bins, trays, baggies, old MOCs and models, the damned things are.  Decades ago I thought Brickset was an answer to this problem, but years of experience has taught me that, while it helps, it's no silver bullet. It would be great if I had local cataloging software that interfaced with my theoretical sorting machine, scanned barcodes on kits and instruction books and could update inventories based on parts usage in Stud.IO and other MOC design software.

Display: There is never enough display space and the space I have is rarely used efficiently.  Bookcases are readily available but the shelfs are often not adjustable enough (sometimes it would be nice to have half depth shelves, stepped tiers or sloped mounting surfaces rather than flat shelving.  Shelves are often designed for the weight of books and are (distractingly) overkill for delicate Lego models.  The opaque nature of most bookcases with solid shelves makes lighting the interior of the "box" an issue, defeating the point of displaying the model in the first place.  And, in the case of my office (and I'm sure others may have this problem as well) if the Lego room is in a converted attic space the knee walls might not be tall enough to accommodate a 6-7 foot tall (~2 meter) bookcase.  Something more modular and stackable would be much more versatile.

Dust: I have to believe that when Phillip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials series, he was thinking of trying to keep his Lego collection clean when he came up with the concept of Dust.  I'm pretty sure the three laws of thermodynamics declare that where there are Legos, there will be dust.  From an engineering project standpoint this makes it a target rich environment for inventing mitigators. How do I reduce the amount of dust that gets to my display models?  How do I clean the dust off my models? How do I reduce the amount of dust in my Lego workspace? How do I retouch my physical MOC photos to eliminate dust artifacts?  How do I retouch my virtual MOC rendering to add dust and make the model appear more real?

Photography: Building a better light box and the world will beat a path to your door.  Mine is always too small with too few lighting options to do justice to large models with lots of small details.  I need something with multiple, positionable light sources (both directional and ambient).  Adjustable brightness and warmth, color gels.  A featureless backdrop that scales for larges models.  And the whole thing needs to collapse into a compact storage bin when not in use as I can't afford to commit a couple hundred cubic feet of space to a dedicated photography studio; I'd like to be able to (easily) set it up, tear it down or even take it outside on a sunny day.