Where are your Legos?

Legos, those wonderful little toy bricks of Scandinavian design, have been in our popular culture since 1961. You've probably played with them as a child and bought them for your own children. We've also seen them slowly making their way from the physical world to the digital in games like Lego Harry Potter and Lego Star Wars.

Legos have made a recent comeback with the growth of DIY (do-it-yourself) culture. These interchangeable building blocks lend themselves to endless customization that is only limited by the creativity of the builder. Keep forgetting your keys? Build a Lego key holder! Love bird-watching and have a big tub of Legos left over from your kids? Follow Tom Poulsom's lead and build birds out of them. 

People all over have discovered new and exciting ways to play and use legos. Hillel Cooperman's TED Talk shows the growing subculture of Lego-designers complete with conventions and post-market products. Amazingly researchers at the University of Cambridge have used the automated properties of Lego Mindstorms to grow bones in their lab. Let me say that again, they are using toys designed to teach programming to GROW BONES! 

Need inspiration? You can find plenty of it: architecture, robotics, home decoration, film, and even installation art.

So dig out that old tub of Legos and get to work. If you need some help, consider these books at the library:

Lego Ideas Book: Full of inspiration from trains to space ships.

The Unofficial Lego Builder's Guide by Allen Bedford: Full of great building techniques to make great (and stable) works of Lego art.

The Lego Book by Daniel Lipkowitz: Full of great pictures and descriptions, you'll find the history of Legos and all of its various themes.