In a new book, we follow the free flow of ideas and the creative building process that LEGO bricks can spark in so many of us. By the end, readers have a better understanding of why everyone loves LEGO – and, along the way, have followed the creation of a pirate spaceship.
This Is Why You Love LEGO
If you are looking for a beautiful coffee-table book featuring 500 spectacular LEGO models, Jess Uhre Rahbek’s new book about LEGO probably does not belong on your Christmas wish list. If, on the other hand, you want to understand the toy’s ability to spark engagement, creativity and ideas in children and adults across the world, the design researcher behind the book has plenty of deep insights to offer.
The book is simply called *This Is Why You Love LEGO* and, across 184 pages, explores what happens to our creativity and play whether we empty a box of LEGO bricks onto the floor and start free-building with no plan, or sit down to construct a beautiful bouquet of flowers.
From 2018 to 2021, Jess Uhre Rahbek carried out his PhD project in collaboration with the design team at LEGO House. Along the way, he developed a way of describing what makes something good to play with. That knowledge has now been turned into a book written for anyone who loves building, or who wants to understand what makes good play good.
“This is probably the first book in the world to look this closely at the encounter between the building bricks and the person playing with them, rather than focusing on the company behind them. I am trying to put into words the creative play that draws people of all ages towards that exciting pile of bricks, and which has created such a broad fan community around the world,” says Jess Uhre Rahbek, Assistant Professor at Kolding School of Design and a researcher in play and design in the school’s Lab for Play Design.
Play without boundaries
The book is written for the many millions of adult LEGO fans around the world, for people who work professionally with play, and for the growing number of adults who buy toys for themselves.
LEGO attracts young and old all over the world. This was underlined in August 2026, when the LEGO Group announced its strongest ever half-year results. Among its best-selling product lines were LEGO Botanicals and LEGO Icons, both of which are largely bought by adults who build simply for their own enjoyment.
Design researcher Jess Uhre Rahbek has spent three years studying and describing the creative play that emerges in the company of building bricks. That is the knowledge readers are invited into through the book.
Photo: Oliver Båge
“Wherever in the world I have talked about my research project, the same thing has happened. The moment I said LEGO, people almost stopped listening and started telling me about their own childhood, or about the last thing they had built. That affection has rarely been described from a knowledge-based perspective. I have had the privilege of spending three years sitting alongside the designers at LEGO House, investigating what actually happens between a person and a pile of bricks. That is the knowledge I want to pass on,” says Jess Uhre Rahbek.
Brick. Meet Imagination.
We do not want to spoil the reader’s own experience of the book, but we will allow ourselves to delve a little into its substance.
At the heart of the book is a fictional story about a boy called Theodor. In the story, he sits in his room and empties a box of mixed bricks onto the floor, simply enjoying some free-building without any particular plan.
First, he finds an interesting wheel and decides he wants to build a rally car. Then he comes across another brick that looks like a rocket engine from a spaceship. The car is abandoned. A spaceship appears in the boy’s imagination. Later, he finds a pirate cannon in the pile. It has no business being on a spaceship, but it is too good to leave unused. And so Theodor ends up with a space-pirate ship.
“The story is fictional, but the model is real. I sat with my own bricks and built that ship while I was writing because I wanted to be sure I was describing what actually happens. I thought I was going to build one thing, and then there was a brick in front of me that wanted something else. I saw that happen countless times at LEGO House while I was working there,” says Jess Uhre Rahbek.
One of the book’s key ideas is to show how a story emerges in the builder’s mind during the act of building. Theodor – and Jess – are not simply creating a LEGO pirate spaceship. They are also inventing the world it is about to enter, complete with space pirates, treasure on distant planets and someone chasing them.
Where other kinds of toys may come with a pre-designed world populated by heroes, villains and people in need of rescue, the bricks leave room for Theodor to create his own world and an accompanying adventure around the model he invents. In that sense, the model is only the tip of the iceberg.
In Jess Uhre Rahbek’s research, this is referred to as a form of tension in play: "playful tension".
“Good play needs to contain ambiguity. The common perception is that LEGO is creative play because there are so many possibilities. And that is not wrong. But what makes the play creative is just as much the interplay between the constraints and possibilities that the individual bricks bring with them. The interesting part emerges in the tension between openness and direction,” explains Jess Uhre Rahbek.
Jess Uhre Rahbek built the pirate spaceship whose creation we follow throughout the book while he was writing it.
Photo: Oliver Båge
This is why you love LEGO – also in Chinese
You might think building would become boring once you mastered it, but the opposite is true. The more skilled you become, the more forms become possible – and the harder they are to make work together. The challenge simply moves with you, and that is where experienced builders find their own construction solutions and develop their own language for them.
The book strikes a balance between research and personal memories of the author’s own experiences with LEGO throughout his life.
“I have set academic language aside and tried to tell the story in as engaging and entertaining a way as possible. Even the most hardcore LEGO fan should come away from the book with a new understanding of something they already know extremely well, and with better language for describing what is actually so good about LEGO,” says Jess Uhre Rahbek.
Although the book is about bricks, its insights reach much further. The same understanding of when something invites participation – and when it gets in the way – can be applied to playgrounds, teaching, games and the spaces we create for one another. This is what it means to work with play as a design discipline, and why it is taken seriously as a field of research.
The fact that the book is being published by one of the world’s leading academic publishers and will be read by LEGO fans from Billund to Beijing says something about the appetite for understanding this kind of phenomenon.
Play is no longer something that belongs only to childhood.
About the book
"This Is Why You Love LEGO" by Jess Uhre Rahbek will be published by MIT Press on 13 October 2026. 184 pages. English edition, with a Chinese edition to follow.
The book is based on the PhD thesis "Designing for Playful Tension", carried out from 2018 to 2021 in collaboration with the design team at LEGO House and funded by the LEGO Foundation.
Kolding School of Design invites you to the book launch on 29 October from 15:00 to 17:00 in the school’s auditorium. Here, the author will be joined by LEGO designer Luka Grkovic for a conversation about LEGO, the story behind his research, and how to design something that others feel inspired to explore.
