Feature Articles » Dream Jobs 2004

Lau Kofoed Kierstein: Playtime in the Land of Lego

Age:

30

What He Does:

Comes up with ideas for new toys; designs toys

For Whom:

Lego System A/S

Where He Does It:

Billund, Denmark

Fun Factors:

Tests prototype toys with children; travels around the world to meet with toy designers and check out new electronic components; plays with competitors' toys

"Up there is where I have my table, but, unfortunately, you can't see it," says Lau Kofoed Kierstein, smiling sheepishly and pointing at some second-story windows in a brick building with a red-tile roof. We're standing in a charming, green, leaf-strewn quadrangle in the bucolic headquarters complex of the toy giant Lego System A/S in Billund, Denmark.

For a year now Kierstein has been the technical lead "on a project of great strategic importance....It's going to be a big blast when it comes out, that's for sure. It will be a new era for Lego."

"We play a lot, and we test a lot of different things," he adds. "Every week, we have kids coming in, and we play with them to see what is cool for them, what is hip for them. It's intense because we are on unknown ground."

That's all he can say about it.

Really? Nothing else? "Well, it comes out in 2005."

The world of high-tech toy making is viciously competitive, with huge fortunes turning on the ideas and expertise of a relatively small number of people. But if the 30-year-old Kierstein is typical, these people are not letting a little cutthroat competition stand in the way of rather great amounts of fun. On our second day of meetings, he apologizes for being a few minutes late. It turns out he and his co-workers had spent the morning racing some radio-controlled cars.

Toy Story:: Lau Kofoed Kierstein's first big project for Lego was the Galidor Kek Powerizer, which responded to cues broadcast by a children's television show.

The ubiquitous primary-colored plastic building blocks remain the backbone of the Lego line, but electronics-based playthings—such as the MindStorms line of modular robotic toys—make up about 10 percent of the company's 450 different retail offerings, according to Lego spokeswoman Mette Uhd Hansen. And Kierstein, as senior technologist in Lego's Global Innovation and Marketing Organization, finds himself involved with almost everything the company is working on that beeps, glows, talks, walks, or races around the floor.

Besides designing toys and brainstorming about them, he helps designers and marketers understand what can be done with electronics, he travels around the world to keep in touch with Lego freelance toy designers, and he checks in periodically at the MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., which Lego cosponsors.

At Lego's home base in Billund, he has a work area in each of two Lego buildings; they're bright, open, airy spaces where he and other Lego designers and engineers talk, hash out designs, play with toys, and kick around ideas. At the moment, those areas are strewn with secret prototype toys, which is why I'm not allowed to enter.

A lifelong music fan who plays bass guitar in a U2 cover band called Elevation, Kierstein found his way into the toy business through his specific passion: acoustics. Four years ago, while he was working in Copenhagen as an engineer at an acoustics institute affiliated with the Technical University of Denmark, he had an idea for an inexpensive circuit to detect where sounds are coming from. He thought Lego might want it. They didn't, but they did want him.

"I was lucky. Or they were lucky. I don't know," he laughs.

His first assignment at Lego was to come up with an action figure to go with a children's sci-fi television show called "Galidor." The company's franchise director, Jacob Kragh, turned Kierstein loose on the project with these words: "We need a $50 item. Do something interesting."

He did. He designed a doll that interacts with the "Galidor" TV show, or with other dolls of its kind. Placed up to a few meters away from a TV, the dolls occasionally blurt out comments, seemingly reacting with perfect timing to the TV characters' exclamations or other events on the screen. It's all done with a simple but powerful acoustic communications system of Kierstein's conception.

Basically, the show's soundtrack sends out acoustic signals that trigger any one of 227 prerecorded utterances in the doll, or 85 simple animations that play on a small LCD screen on the toy figure's back. Viewers of the show don't notice the signals, an extremely faint chirping, because Kierstein's system masks them in other noises in the show's soundtrack and also exploits psychoacoustic quirks in human hearing.

The ingeniousness of the system is in that masking, and also in the fact that by relying on simple electronic components and very clever design, Kierstein's team held the cost of the entire acoustic receiving system in each doll below 7 Danish kroner, or about US $1.

For Kierstein, the project was a whirlwind introduction to the world of big-time toy making. Several months into the project, he had to fly to California for some meetings with the producers of "Galidor." "I had just started at Lego, and suddenly I'm standing on Santa Monica Beach, talking to Hollywood producers. Who could imagine that?"

The action figure, called the Galidor Kek Powerizer, was well received by its target audience of six- to eight-year-old boys. But the TV show wasn't a big hit, and the doll is already hard to find in stores. Nevertheless, the acoustic communications system will show up in future toys, Kierstein hints.

Best of all, though, as far as Kierstein is concerned, the toy made some children happy. Of all the possible confirmations of a new toy's worth, the best one for him is "looking at children's faces when they see something surprising and they think it's magic."

—Glenn Zorpette

By Photo: Urlik Jantzen