"Fuma Terai is not a Lego designer. Based in Japan, he is far away from Billund, the small Danish town where all the company's official design work happens. And yet, Terai is responsible for one of Lego's best sets of the year: Gizmo, the iconic creature from Joe Dante's 1984 classic Gremlins. In 2024, Terai submitted an adorable Mogwai as part of '80s design challenge from Lego Ideas, the company's crowdsourcing community platform that turns fan ideas into real sets."
"More than a year later, his idea is now selling for $110 on Lego's website. Building a Lego set is an exhaustive process that marries creativity and technical precision. Before fans ever see a finished Lego product on shelves, its creation demanded a special negotiation between structural strength and playability, realism and abstraction. Lego designers have always needed to resolve impossible-seeming tensions to bring a set to life, and the creation of Gizmo, with his expressive features and fur, forced this process to its limits."
Fuma Terai, based in Japan, created an official Lego Gizmo set despite not being an in-house designer. Terai submitted a Mogwai through Lego Ideas' '80s design challenge, and the set now retails for $110. Lego set production requires balancing creativity with technical precision, negotiating structural strength against playability and realism against abstraction. Designers must resolve difficult geometric and engineering tensions to achieve both expressive detail and buildability. The Gizmo build pushed those constraints to extremes, demanding inventive techniques to represent expressive features and fur while remaining structurally sound and enjoyable to build.
Read at Fast Company
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