Did you know that the world’s most successful creativity tool started as a carpenter’s side project?
LEGO started as a small carpentry workshop in Billund, Denmark — a town of a few thousand people in the middle of Jutland. Ole Kirk Christiansen, a carpenter, began making wooden toys in 1932 during the Depression because furniture orders had dried up. He called his company LEGO, from the Danish leg godt: play well.
He had no idea he was building a system that would still be in use ninety years later. Nobody did.
The Idea
The genius of LEGO is not the brick. It’s that every brick fits every other brick — and always has, since the modern stud-and-tube system was patented in 1958. A brick made in 1958 still connects to one made today. That level of compatibility, maintained across sixty-five years of production, is almost without parallel in the design world.
