WHAT WOULD LEGO DO?

FUTURE OF PLAY LAB: EXPECT TO BE WRONG LEGO is a global toy company that faces big shifts in our perception of childhood, learning, parenting styles, and play. With digital immersion, shifting parenting styles, and evolving emotional and cognitive needs, LEGO must anticipate how children will play, learn, and develop in a world where traditional patterns no longer apply. Their challenge is not keeping up with trends, but understanding the deep generational shifts that will shape the next 10–30 years.

LEGO is using a unique long-horizon to trend research and strategy. Through its internal future research teams LEGO studies children’s behaviour ethnographically across cultures and tracks “families of play”. By analysing how kids invent stories, collaborate, negotiate, and integrate technology into their make-believe worlds, LEGO identifies emerging skills, values, and cultural themes to design for the future of play rather

than react to seasonal trends.

LEGO AND THE FUTURE OF PLAY

LEGO is one of the world’s most iconic toy brands, long associated with creativity, play, and learning. While the company could rely on patents for many years, it now depends on continuous innovation in what it calls the experience of play. This includes short-term cycles—such as partnering with films, games, and story worlds that resonate with today’s children—but far more importantly, LEGO focuses on deep, long-term shifts. The company looks beyond seasonal trends to generational change, often working with horizons of 20 to 30 years. The central question is not which toy will sell next year, but how ideas about play, creativity, learning, and parenting evolve across generations and cultures.

GENERATIONAL INSIGHT AND “FAMILIES OF PLAY”

To understand these long-term shifts, LEGO brings children and families directly into its labs and offices. There, they observe play almost anthropologically: how children interact with each other, how technology influences imagination, how gender neutrality plays out in play, and how parenting styles differ globally. LEGO treats children’s imagination as one of its most empirical research tools. By watching how kids reinterpret, remix, or even “misuse” toys, LEGO uncovers what it calls families of play: larger patterns that cut across generations. Play might happen in seconds as a quick moment, in long immersive sessions, as a creative performance, or as a nostalgic reference to childhood. These patterns reveal how the meaning of play changes over time—and where the next big shifts are likely to emerge.

PROTOTYPE & TEST TO FAIL, NOT TO PROVE

When insights are translated into product ideas, LEGO places equal importance on testing—but not to confirm assumptions. The goal is to fail early and learn fast. As the head of LEGO’s lab often says, what adults think children will love is frequently very different from what children actually love. LEGO encourages kids to use products in unintended ways, because those moments reveal the most valuable insights. Rather than predicting the future of play, LEGO builds prototypes, puts them into children’s hands early, and observes what happens. This approach takes time, patience, and repeated failure—but it is far better to learn early in the process than to face disappointment later through poor reviews and missed expectations. LEGO’s guiding principle is clear: don’t forecast the future of play—discover it by building and testing with real users.

Ask yourself:

• Where could you observe future generations using your product?

• How could you gain more ideas from users?

• What shift might become your biggest challenge in the long run?