Brickfinder Goes To A LEGO Workshop With John Ho

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2016 by Brickfinder

Last Friday, I had the privilege and honour of attending the first ever LEGO workshop, conducted by LEGO designer John Ho, in South East Asia!

This workshop was the accumulation of months of planning and held in conjunction with the Build My LEGO Christmas event at the One Utama shopping centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

John Ho is the only LEGO Designer from Hong Kong who has worked on the Bionicle series and most recently the Star Wars Buildable Figures line, notably the Darth Vader (75111) set.

I honestly had no idea what to expect as this is the first time that I’m attending a workshop conducted by LEGO themselves but after having experienced it, it was a real treat.

John was in attendance and opened the workshop by explaining some of the inner workings of The LEGO Group and explained in more detail the work that went into the Bionicle theme.

He talked about some of the challenges that went into the design of the Bionicle sets as well as the Star Wars Buildable figures.

He even went to share with us some of the work that he as recently done but I cannot go into ANY specifics as it was divulged only to the those who were attending the workshop and we were sworn to secrecy.

See, this is why one should start participating in LUG (LEGO User Group) activities!

Then we were split into small groups and given a bunch of bricks with only 30 minutes to build something out of our imaginations.

MOCing is one thing, but to build and design with a time limit is another thing entirely. While some came up with amazing art sculptures and robots, I only came up with a convertible car that was too pathetic to photograph.

So this MOC exercise was just to have a bit of fun and there were a couple of LEGO sets to be won, the Beatles Yellow Submarine (21306) and the LEGO House (4000010) which would be awarded to the top two builds. Since the submarine is still unavailable in this part of the world, that would be a really nice prize to take home.

Next up was Jacky Chen, LCE Community Manager for Asia, who gave us a slideshow walkthrough of The LEGO House in Billund that will be unveiled in the later half of 2017.

The following “Question and Answer” session was quite thorough, delving into topics from LUG support to even the dreaded Lepin issue but both John Ho and Jacky Chen, fielded the questions quite diplomatically.

This workshop is something that I feel an AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) would definitely appreciate. It is a rare insight into the mind of a LEGO designer as well as how The LEGO Group managed its’ community outreach.

I really wish to thank John Ho, Jacky Chen, Dick Yoong for organising and conducting this workshop. As well as the different Malaysia LUGs, LOM (LUG of Malaysia), Synergy and AB LUG, for allowing us to participate in this community activity.

It is my hope that this type of event can be translated to the Singapore scene where the AFOLs could experience it first hand as well.