Article URL: https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/d-lego-building-instructions-through-time Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950518 Points: 37 # Comments…

Building instructions. The silent helper that without a single word guides you, step by step, to transform your pile of bricks to fantastic creations. The tool that shows you building techniques and gives you a solid foundation for further exploring the wonders of the LEGO® brick. Let’s take a look at some of the many historic milestones. The history of building instructions starts with very simplified instructions as early as 1955. Prior to this the only ‘guidance’ for products containing plastic bricks were drawings on the packaging to serve as inspiration for consumers. There were also examples of small leaflets with inspirational material inside some boxes in the 1950s. The company also produced more elaborate inspirational material to hand out or sell separately, the so called “byggebog”, which directly translates to ‘building book’, but perhaps a better term is idea book. The Idea book was first published in 1955 and contained among other things information on different building techniques and inspiration for building houses. In 1955, the LEGO® System in Play idea was introduced. The groundbreaking idea that among other things makes sure the bricks you buy today will fit with the bricks you bought yesterday and the bricks you buy tomorrow. The first LEGO System in Play products were centered around a town environment (Town Plan no. 1). The town plan and the houses and shops etc. to inhabit the town was the first time the LEGO Group introduced special sets with specific models, as in, the model you saw on the box was also what you could build with the content of the box. This created a need for more instruction to make sure all consumers could reach the wanted result and thus the first simple building instructions were introduced. Although instructions for specific models started to appear there was also a focus on encouraging alternate builds as the below instructions also shows. In the text to the left, it was suggested to build the two buildings together with other buildings on the town plan to create “nice corner shops”. Sketches for some of these instructions found in the LEGO® Group Archives suggest that these early pioneering instructions for LEGO sets were most likely made in-house Just as the new specialized Town Plan sets with building instructions had a hint of free building/alternate builds in them, the basic sets, with a high degree of free building, started having suggestions for instructions. From 1955 onwards, simple instructions for houses were found in basic sets to serve as inspiration/play starters for consumers. This mirrors the different views present in the company at the time. For example, documents reveal an internal discussion in 1960 where the company’s management have different views on how much “help” consumers should receive when building with LEGO® bricks. Should you only provide inspirational material and let children’s imagination do the rest or do you “educate” children with instructions and thus building techniques in the hope that by doing so you instill confidence in children to investigate the endless building possibilities of the LEGO system later in their play journey. The material available in the early 1960s suggests a compromise and the above-mentioned observation hints at a similar situation in the mid-1950s. Building instructions for suggestions for houses you could build with various basic sets such as set no. 700/1, 700/2 etc. From the introduction of the LEGO® brick, we know today, in 1958 and the much-improved stability that came with the ingenious interlocking principle, LEGO sets slowly became bigger and more detailed and this demanded a change in building instructions in the early 1960s. From then the instructions slowly started to contain more building steps than earlier, and the building experience was improved by consistently adding color to the instructions. However, the instructions were still very simplified compared to the ones we have today. The instructions would normally have two sides with one showing steps to build the model depicted on the front of the box and the other side would contain images of alternate builds. Going back to the beforementioned internal discussions it seems we are still looking at the art of compromise.