Lego's new Smart Play system, announced at CES earlier this week, is an embrace of digital technology the likes of which we haven't seen from the company before. And while the demonstration it gave on Monday was a good start towards showing just what Lego's Smart Brick is capable of, there's no substitute for seeing it in person. Fortunately, an extended demo answered a lot of my questions on how the system will work once
The Smart Brick has a 4.1mm ASIC chip inside of it that Lego says is smaller than a standard Lego stud. It runs something called the Play Engine that can sense things like motion, orientation and magnetic fields. Thanks to this and some integrated copper coils, the Smart Brick can sense distance, direction and orientation of other Smart Bricks near it when you're building.
As designers of interactive products, we are often working with or designing for a specific technology that frames our work and enables interaction between users and systems. Many designers are used to designing for mobile, web, or smart TVs, yet few know how to design with sensors. This is partly because design education tends to focus on aesthetic, usability and ergonomic aspects rather than on the technological dimensions of design or on how designers can treat technology as a design material.