Year Lego began selling interlocking plastic bricks, revolutionizing toy design
The Blocks Are the Product
In 1947, the Danish toy company Lego began selling interlocking plastic bricks. It was a radical business model: the company produced no finished products, only standardized components. The value was not in a pre-defined toy but in the creative process it enabled in the hands of a child. This was the antithesis of mass production. While Ford sold a completed Model T, Lego sold potential. It catered directly to what Abraham Maslow would call “self-actualization” and what Shuichi Fukuda terms the “Do-It-Myself” (DIM) drive—the intrinsic motivation to build, create, and problem-solve. Unbeknownst to the industrial giants of the era, Lego had discovered a fundamental truth: as basic material needs are met, the highest economic value migrates from the product to the process of creation itself.
The Modularization Revolution
The late 20th century saw industry reluctantly converge on this truth through the backdoor of efficiency. Modularization—designing products as systems of interchangeable parts—began as a production strategy to manage complexity and cost. The iconic example was Volkswagen’s 1996 Resende factory, which outsourced assembly to modules of local suppliers. But a subtle shift occurred. From trucks (where modular bodies served different functions) to wedding dresses (where unique bodices attach to common skirts), modularity began enabling user-centric customization. It allowed customers to participate in the final configuration, injecting their “Self” into the product. This wasn’t the producer-centric “mass customization” of marketing textbooks; it was a structural accommodation of the human desire for agency, turning the user from a passive consumer into a co-creator.
The Value of Wear and Trust
This shift from product to process value upends traditional notions of quality. Danish furniture maker Friz Hansen sells leather chairs with natural scratches at a premium. Why? The scratches tell a story; they invite the user into a narrative process, imagining the life of the animal. The value is in the patina of use, not the pristine state of delivery. Similarly, Japanese shoe company Asics discovered that the degraded, “broken-in” form of a running shoe was biomechanically superior for comfort and performance. Instead of fighting degradation, they engineered shoes to flex and form to the foot from the start, valuing the adaptive process of “fitting” over static design. This philosophy aligns with Genichi Taguchi’s quality “Loss Function,” which measures cost to society from a product’s failure to perform over its lifecycle. Durability and adaptability create trust, and trust becomes the new brand equity.
Software’s Lead and Hardware’s Lag
The software industry internalized this process-centric model early, giving it names like “continuous prototyping” or “agile development.” Developers release a “minimum viable product” with core functions, then iteratively upgrade based on real user feedback. The product is never “finished”; it is in a perpetual state of becoming, growing with the user’s confidence and needs. This mirrors human growth and learning. Hardware engineering, bound by physical atoms, has struggled to follow. Yet, the logic is inescapable. If software development is growth, then hardware degradation is its mirror image. The wear on a tool, the adaptation of a shoe, the patina on a chair—these are not failures but records of a successful, evolving relationship between human and object. The next frontier is “degradation engineering”: designing physical goods whose value increases, or is sustained, through intelligent wear and user adaptation.
The Networked “Self”
This evolution signals a deeper structural change. The 20th-century industrial model was a linear, tree-structured system optimized for a single output (a specific car model). The 21st-century model is a parallel, network-based system. In a network, any node can become an output point, enabling immense diversification and adaptability. Products are no longer standalone artifacts but nodes in a user’s ecosystem—a smartphone connecting to health sensors, to a car, to a home. The value is in the seamless, adaptive integration of these nodes, a process managed not by a central planner but by the user—the “Self.” Engineering’s task is no longer to design perfect, isolated products, but to create interoperable, humble components that empower users to build their own adaptive, personal networks. The engineer becomes an enabler of processes, not a dictator of products.
References
Fukuda, S. (2019). Self engineering: Learning from failures. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. Taguchi, G., Chowdhury, S., & Wu, Y. (2000). The Mahalanobis-Taguchi system. McGraw-Hill Professional. Volkswagen Group. (19