Featured Speaker
Designers: Transformers in Disguise
Mike Ganderton, Creative Senior Director, Markets and Products, LEGO Group
As millions have discovered over the past 50 years, LEGO bricks are unparalleled as a transformation toy. The company behind the toy is also no stranger to transformation. Guided by the CEO’s shared vision, the entire LEGO Group has undergone a five-year metamorphosis, from a company running up huge losses in the mid 2000s, to a crisis-busting organization on a mission to “invent the future of play.” Mike Ganderton will illustrate how being a part of this transformation experience has answered some of the questions commonly asked of design leaders.
Biography: Mike Ganderton
Mike Ganderton is a Creative Senior Director in the Markets and Products division of the LEGO Group. As a member of a Product Group leadership team, he is responsible for securing design and play quality for the BIONICLE action figure line, LEGO Technic and the recently launched LEGO Games System.
Prior to joining the LEGO Group in 2001, Mike worked as a Design Manager for Dyson Ltd. developing early generations of the successful dual cyclone vacuum cleaners. Mike graduated with first class honors from the Design for Industry course at Northumbria University in 1992.
About the LEGO Group
The name LEGO is an abbreviation of the two Danish words “leg godt,” meaning “play well”. It’s our name and it’s our ideal. The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 and has developed from a small carpenter’s workshop to a modern, global enterprise that is the world’s fifth-largest manufacturer of toys.
The LEGO Group headquarters are in Billund, Denmark and this is home to the Markets and Products division which employs over 100 designers from 15 different countries. The company launches approximately 200 new construction toys each year.
The LEGO design organization is the guardian of LEGO “system in play”—all LEGO elements are fully compatible, irrespective of where or when they were made during the period from 1958 to the present. It is also at the forefront of the company’s innovation efforts, working to make LEGO construction toys attractive and relevant to each new generation, and to open up new ways to “play well.”
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