Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Brick by Brick: Lego's New Building Blocks (01 Sep 2005) Beginning in late August, some of the bricks arriving at this 450,000-square-foot warehouse will travel to a small corner cordoned off by conveyor belts. That's the home of Lego Factory, a new initiative that lets fans decide what they'd like to build and then lets them buy the necessary bricks. Customers create any structure they can imagine using Lego's freely downloadable Digital Designer software. If they then decide to actually build their creation, the software, which keeps track of which pieces are required, sends the order to this corner of the Enfield warehouse. There, employees put all the pieces (which are grouped in standardized bags) into a box, along with instructions, and ship it off. "We've been toying with this idea for a long time," says Steven Hawco, vice president of Lego's Shop at Home division, which is overseeing the project. "And now technology is giving us the ability to actually do this." Article URL: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/98/dispatch.html Read 44 more articles from Fast Company sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Lightning in a Bottle     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy