Earlier this week, LEGO ran a survey on the LEGO Insiders page about switching from paper instructions to digital instructions. The LEGO fan community had a strongly negative response to the survey, especially after LEGO fan sites, blogs, and social media pages posted about it. Since then, the survey has been taken down, and LEGO even posted an official response to the questions and concerns raised by LEGO fans.
LEGO has been testing the waters with the idea of switching to digital instructions for several years now. Back in 2019, they added a new feature to the LEGO Life app called Instructions Plus. LEGO Life was a simple and heavily moderated online community app for children ages 5+ to take part in challenges, watch videos, and share their creations. First, Instructions Plus only included a few sets aimed at young children, but LEGO gradually added instructions for larger sets and sets meant for older builders.
A year later, LEGO separated out Instructions Plus into its own app called LEGO Building Instructions. This allowed teen and adult builders to access digital building instructions without having to navigate through the kiddie interface of the LEGO Life app. The LEGO Building Instructions app was later renamed the LEGO Builder app, which has been heavily promoted by LEGO via its website, set descriptions, email campaigns, social media pages, etc. Some sets now don’t even include building instructions like the sets released via the BrickLink Designer Program, LEGO Super Mario sets, alternate builds for several LEGO sets, etc.
Initially, LEGO fans appreciated the introduction of digital building instructions as an alternate way to build LEGO sets. They are especially helpful when more than one person is working on different parts of the same set. And the 3D-building and other advanced features can be useful when building complex models. However, there has been a rising concern that LEGO wants to eventually phase out paper instructions completely. And the wording of the most recent survey accelerated these fears:
Sustainable Building: Help Us Decide the Future of LEGO Building Instructions!
We want to play our part in building a sustainable future for generations to come.
One way we can do this is to reduce our paper usage by switching to digital building instructions.
It’s a small change that can make a big difference – and we’d love to know how you feel about it.
Let us know by taking this quick survey.
LEGO fans were highly alarmed by this survey and its implications. You can read a good sample of the typical responses in the comment section of this Brickset.com article, as well as in several discussions at Reddit.com. In response, LEGO has taken down the survey and posted the following response:
We would like to reassure fans that we have no plans to stop using physical building instructions in our products. We conducted this survey to understand more about our adult fans’ preferences regarding our products and building experience, something we do regularly across a range of topics. We would like to thank our LEGO Insiders members who took the time to respond to the survey – your feedback is important to us and helps us make our LEGO experiences even better.
It seems like LEGO got the message that completely switching to digital building instructions is not a good idea at this time, although they will likely keep pushing it. As suggested by many, the size of paper building instructions could be reduced by adding more building steps per page, and there are likely other ways to save resources as well.
What do you think? Do you prefer paper or digital building instructions? Feel free to share your thoughts and discuss in the comment section below!
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Absolutely no from me. I tried the builder app, or whatever it is called now, and it was cool, but I don’t want to be staring at a screen when I’m building LEGO. The whole point of the hobby is to give us a break.
No from me too. They took down the survey because they didn’t get the response they wanted? Then why even bother surveying people?
They took down the survey because they got a significant enough response (negative) that it wasn’t worth maintaining.
Absolute no from me as well. Not everyone has a device to view instructions with and even if you have a phone, it’s not a good experience to try and build with instructions on a small screen like that.
I’m trying to get my kids away from digital devices. And Lego is great for that. Too bad they took down the survey, but no from me too.
I’ve been using the digital instructions on a display as a nice way of clearing up space for larger builds, but I certainly don’t want them to discontinue hard-copy instructions. I might not always have internet access I’d hate to not be able to build a model without the instructions.
I can’t imagine anyone wanting printed instructions to go away. They are valuable to build and restore old sets.
Hard no from me…Lego is for relaxing! Not juggling a digital interface. However, alt builds are fine in digital especially if they are easily printed and laid out to conserve paper
I’m in my sixties and have been building Lego for about 10 years. I always use the digital instructions. I don’t use the app. I download the instructions as pdf files from Lego.com website and store them locally on my tablet or PC. I have a pile of instruction booklets over 2ft high that I don’t know what to with. It’s also nice being able to view instructions for sets I don’t have, great for learning building techniques. However, as the comments have shown lots of people prefer physical booklets. I don’t see any way that Lego could do away with paper copies, they’ll have to keep providing both paper copies and digital versions.
I prefer paper, myself, and I have a bunch of old instructions saved from my childhood. (Not that I get along to rebuild old sets very often, but still…)
I appreciate the drive towards sustainability, but despite what our parents told us, the internet is NOT forever. I just tried to use the QR code for our new Tork paper towel dispenser installed three months ago, and the link is already deprecated. The only way to ensure files are available in something approximating perpetuity is piracy, and I don’t think Lego wants that.
Tork sounds Swedish. Is it Ikea?