Jess Uhre Rahbek Announces This Is Why You Love LEGO
The MIT Press book, out Oct. 13, draws on three years embedded with the LEGO House design team.
This Is Why You Love LEGO comes out Oct. 13 from MIT Press. Jess Uhre Rahbek, an assistant professor at the LAB for Play Design at Design School Kolding in Denmark, spent three years embedded with the design team at LEGO House in Billund. The book is the result: 184 pages, $19.95 in paperback.
The press is selling it as a gift for the LEGO fan in your life, which undersells it. Rahbek follows one young builder, Theodor, as he makes a space pirate ship, and uses that single build to lay out the range of things people do with bricks. Some follow the manual. Some start from a vague idea, or from no idea at all, a mode the book calls "drifting and shifting." A second term, "playful tension," names something the company's designers have to handle. In his blurb, artist Nathan Sawaya describes the subject as the tension between instruction and imagination.
A LEGO set ships as a solved level and a pile of parts you can ignore. Sandbox games, level editors and speedruns all live in the same gap, between what a designer scripted and what a player decides to do instead. Game studies has plenty of theory about that gap. What it rarely gets is three years of fieldwork from inside a company that designs for it every day.
Killscreen has not always been kind to the company. In 2015, when LEGO refused a bulk order from Ai Weiwei, we ran a piece headlined "It's okay. Lego was never your friend anyway." I'd rather read a book about what the bricks let a kid do.
Killscreen reads play wherever it turns up, from design labs to toy aisles to game engines. The free Radar sends three short issues a week.
