My Lego Village

I’m an AFOL (adult fan of lego). I love those little plastic bricks. The tactile feeling of clicking them together, seeing beyond the shape a single brick and how it could fit with others to create a brand new shape. Legos make me happy.

(Lego is still a multi billion dollar corporation which is inherently exploitative to both people and the planet and I’m not defending that by any means!)

I have two shelves hanging on my wall where I am building my lego village. I decided to try and envision a positive future world, rather than reflecting current reality.

The whole village is connected with accessible public transit, solar panels live next to rooftop beehives, food and medicine plants grow in every unused corner, and money doesn’t exist.

One of the most fun parts is to set up little vignettes with the minifigures: A minifigure harvesting an impossibly big carrot, someone dropping a freshly gathered chicken egg, a grumpy old man with a fabulous blue bouffant, and two femme lovers meeting for a picnic under a tree.

I’ve also been making sure the people in the village include the vast variety of humans in the real world. Everything from skin tone, height, disability, gender nonconformance, age, and any other variety I can think of.

I’ve been really pleased with the variety of minifigure parts that are available. There are multiple types of wheelchairs, heads of different skin tones with hearing aids and glasses, prosthetic limbs of various types, hair pieces of different textures, a shirt that says ‘love is love’, service dog harnesses, hair pieces with cochlear implants, and even a head with vitiligo.

In this idealized world I’m imagining, inclusion of everyone is key. 

While I know there’s a lot of work to do to get to this ideal, I do believe it begins with imagining what is possible.

~Aline Harris