The Lego House in Billund, Denmark.
Playing with Lego at the Lego House isn't just play. It's about experience.
The Lego House in Billund, Denmark (the hometown of the Lego Group), has room after Lego-filled room of "great experiences," as Soren Holm, Lego House's head of experience, noted. The companies who designed the attraction "deliver experiences, and deliver individual parts to the experience." It is, in fact, an "experience centre."
The emphasis at the Lego House, like at a museum gallery or a trade-show presentation space, is on experience over simply the idea of an engaging physical space for visitors.
For instance, the building is broken up into zones. One area, the blue zone, includes robotics and architectural themes and is more about mechanical problem solving. Rooms in the green zone are all about storytelling through mini-Lego people and even making a mini-movie. It's part of the whole science of customer experience and the touch points that people have with a brand.
Sam Kohn, president and founder of the Mississauga-based company Kubik Inc., a global event-space designer, exhibition-interior creator, full-service site co-ordinator, and which also helped design the Lego House, puts it even more succinctly. "I would say we're face-to-face marketers."
Kubik builds all manner of experiential attractions globally, with auxiliary offices in Amsterdam and Baltimore, as well as Mount Laurel, N.J., where subsidiary Maltbie is based. Maltbie similarly designs museum interiors and visitor attractions. Mr. Kohn drives home the point of Kubik's global outlook by noting the collection of globes adorning his office.
The company focuses particularly on interiors, from helping to create the Lego House's attractions to designing the interiors of Nike stores. Other projects include the inside of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, the inside of the Newseum (a museum of international news media) in Washington, D.C., even the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif. The list goes on.
Kubik has done everything from auto-show booths to designing the covered, carpeted walkway for the outdoor procession at the coronation ceremony of King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands in 2013. This international outlook was deliberate, Mr. Kohn said. "It's actually a choice we made very early on. We couldn't have grown to the size we are today if we were just in Canada."
Kubik (originally called Exhibits International) nevertheless began in the corporate exhibition space, with a trade-show booth for Texas Instruments in the early 1980s. A decade later, its international footprint was more pronounced with the company's involvement with the Canada and Ontario pavilions at the world's fair in Seville, Spain. "We started with four people, and now we have about 300 people around the world."
For Kubik, the idea of the interior space continues to move well beyond actual interiors, to follow visitors on their digital devices. "The experience should not stop when you leave the building," Mr. Kohn said.
Take museum galleries. The company's niche with museums is a specialization in permanent galleries, rather than temporary exhibits.
"The objective of a museum today is to engage an audience, not just when they're in a building, but when they've left a building," such as sending messages and inviting visitors to learn more online, Mr. Kohn said. For instance, with the Lego House, which is designed to look like a building made of massive Lego blocks, with numerous Lego play areas inside, "we brought a lot of interactive technology to it, a lot of media. We helped them focus their message."
And that message is based on user experience. Shiralee Hudson Hill, lead interpretive planner at the Art Gallery of Ontario, indicated the prevalence of this with public attractions. Ms. Hudson Hill's job is to represent the visitor's interests and perspective in the exhibit-planning process.
"And so what I'm doing as a visitor advocate on that team is looking for those strategies that will help people connect with the issues, connect with the artwork. But we know through learning theory and cognitive theory that we don't actually learn new things unless we attach it to something we already know," she said.
For instance, the AGO has an exhibit within an exhibit by Toronto digital artist Alex Mayhew called ReBlink, in which visitors hold their smartphone or digital pad up to certain paintings and see animated versions of the painting with contemporary references, such as the flaming red-headed Marchesa Casati reaching out from her portrait and shooting a selfie.
"Participatory" is what visitors expect, she said. "It's not a choice."
And the argument is that this is running throughout the entire sector of public attractions. So while a company such as Kubik will still design fixtures, toy with new building materials and the like, "it's about managing information. It's about telling stories. How you engage your audience is going to continue to change as technology changes," Mr. Kohn said.