Play is crucial for the well-being of both adults and children. Together, the LEGO Group and IKEA seek and develop solutions to encourage play throughout the home. This collaboration gave birth to BYGGLEK.
About a year ago, the LEGO Group and IKEA joined forces to be creative, share knowledge and experiences, and create new solutions to facilitate play in every corner of the home. Research by the two companies showed that children need more time to play with their parents. At the same time, parents believe that play is essential for children's happiness and well-being. Despite this, children and adults encounter several barriers when it comes to making playtime happen. While busy schedules and homework don't help create time, lack of space to play is another major difficulty mentioned. “ There’s a conflict between how an adult views organization and how an adult views creativity. Every adult has stepped on a LEGO brick at night. But organizing the pieces, more often than not, also means stopping the fun. Adults organize by type – socks in one drawer and belts in another. Children organize by story, putting together different pieces and things as disparate as a half-built spaceship. It is in this apparent disorganization that they find the missing pieces. What if we could transform what, for us adults, is a mess into something wonderful? ”, says Rasmus Buch Logstrup, designer at the LEGO Group.
Different perspectives can lead children to think that their parents' rules are designed to prevent them from playing. Parents, in turn, feel that a messy house prevents them from carrying out their daily tasks. IKEA and the LEGO Group's ambition is to overcome these obstacles, hoping to move from "no" to "yes" when it comes to playtime, while respecting daily tasks. " To achieve this, systems thinking is key. We know that children continue to build the story in their heads long after they stop playing, so we asked ourselves how we could ensure a quick restart of playtime? Children play with screens because they are quick and easy to (re)start. So what if we could make LEGO playtime start or restart faster? It would be easier to start and continue in children's minds ," says Andreas Fredriksson, IKEA designer.
To enable playtime throughout the house, with breaks, an intergenerational solution is needed. Furthermore, different rooms require different solutions, which can change according to the different stages of a family's life. “ Bringing people together to play and enabling more of these moments is the main objective for us and the LEGO Group, based on our respective visions, missions and goals. That's why we decided to see what would happen if we worked together, to try to get more and more people to say 'yes' to playtime ,” adds Andreas Fredriksson.
The goal is for BYGGLEK to be available for sale starting in 2020.
