Citations › Citation ID: 124

C124. BOOK: Daniel Konstanski, The Secret Life of LEGO Bricks: The Inside Story of a Design Icon (Unbound, 2022), p. 191.

All of these factors led to the development of new elements, the first of what became known internally as LEGO Technic shells. ... It was designed to integrate seamlessly with beams connecting into them across multiple orientations in order to cover large areas. ... The lead LEGO Technic element designer who developed the part for these BIONICLE models sat down after completing it and proceeded to design over forty more shells of various shapes, sizes, geometries and orientations: large, small, angled, curved, straight and everything in between. The LEGO Technic theme had never pre-planned on such a massive scale before and the team pored over these designs, suggesting tweaks and developing a rough priority list. Over the next ten years they would slowly acquire many of them, using a couple of frames year by year.
Copious numbers of designs based on that first shell for BIONICLE proved that there was a whole class of elements waiting to be created that would open up lots of new opportunities for different types of LEGO Technic vehicles.

...

[The] LEGO Technic team members immediately began to incorporate them, both the first variant and successive ones, as more of the initial forty designs became available. First in 2009 and then again in 2010, LEGO Technic products were made virtually entirely of their own beams, shells and connectors. Only an occasional transparent plate or cheese slope depicting a headlight, or some other small detail, sported studs.

LEGO Technic sets adopted the new panels very quickly, radically changing the Technic aesthetic from skeletal models to realistic, fully covered designs. A wide range of Technic panels was imagined from the outset and introduced over time.