Why People Love Lego

It’s LEGO’s World.
You Just Live in It.

Anyone who has played with LEGO bricks long enough eventually asks the question: Why isn’t everything made from LEGO? Imagine a candy-colored world, infinitely configurable and limited only by your imagination. Bored with your furniture? Snap together a new living room set! Planning a fancy dinner party? Break apart the everyday plates and build new place settings! Tired of your two-year-old car? Rearrange the bricks so it sports tail fins that would make Harley Earl blush!

The above scenario is not as far-fetched as you might think. Many LEGO enthusiasts say that working with LEGO since childhood has caused them to see the world with different eyes. With LEGO on the brain, the physical world becomes a hackable platform, and LEGO is the ideal prototyping material for designing on the fly. You can find people who use LEGO to construct cameras, musical instruments, scientific instrumentation, and robots that make Mickey Mouse pancakes (shhh—don’t tell Disney or they’ll raid the poor guy’s home the next time he makes breakfast for his kids). Why are LEGO bricks so useful, both as a toy and a serious physical development platform? There are many reasons, but four stand out:

Standardized parts

Any LEGO brick will happily snap to almost any other LEGO brick in existence, from a vintage 1958 brick to the newest ones available at the LEGOLAND theme park in Carlsbad, California.

Variety of parts

Thanks to the proliferation of kits and TECHNIC parts, enthusiasts have hundreds of different kinds of LEGO parts to work with, from gears and wheels to pneumatics and microcontrollers.

Ease-of-use

The first thing a two-year-old child wants to do with LEGO bricks is put them in his or her mouth. The second thing he or she wants to do with them is snap them together and pull them apart. No manual is required to use LEGO bricks.

Indestructibility

I have a friend who scours garage sales and buys grungy, used LEGO pieces for pennies a tub. When he gets home he tosses them in a mesh bag and runs them through the dishwasher. They come out sparkling and as good as new. LEGO bricks can take almost any punishment you give them.

These powerful features of such deceptively simple bricks have resulted in an explosion of creative diversity that boggles the mind.

Play well!